


this world is after me (after you)

by mm8, ScreechTheMighty



Series: let's be alone together [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Anxiety, F/M, Foggy and Malcolm are also in this for like five seconds, Friends to Dating, Hinted at past sexual abuse, Rated for swearing, alcoholism (hinted at), bipolar!Matt, discussion of mental health issues, nobody copes well with their shit but they're trying, offscreen murder, so much swearing, speculates on events of Defenders but I highly doubt any of it is actually going to happen, they'll get to friends to lovers one day just give them time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-11 17:34:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11719161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mm8/pseuds/mm8, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScreechTheMighty/pseuds/ScreechTheMighty
Summary: Run away like it was yesterdayAnd we could run awayFrom hereAKA the one where you keep stumbling into the life of a guy who you never wanted to see again, and vice-versa, and realize you don't actually mind having him around.Written for the Defenders Big Bang 2017.





	1. Side A

**Author's Note:**

> All graphics and the playlist at the end are by my artist partner for the Defenders Big Bang, mm8, who is Rad As Hell.
> 
> Confession time: this was supposed to be a much longer fic, but unfortunately real life caught up to me and I had to instead divide the fic into three parts in the name of getting this done in time for the Big Bang. I'm not sure when parts two and three will be up, but I promise they will get done. They won't be Defenders-canon compliant, but they will get done. Speaking of, I sneaked in some speculation as to the plot of Defenders/some stuff that I want to happen even though I probably won't but I _really want it to_ , so feel free to see what actually happens twelve (TWELVE!!) days from now.

 

 

_One:_

Here was the thing: she didn’t plan for any of this.

It sounded like such a corny thing to say, like something out of a stupid romcom. _I didn’t plan to fall in love_ or whatever. That was a stupid thing to say, because no one _planned_ to fall in love. It happened, and it sucked, but you dealt with it. No, when Jessica said she hadn’t planned for any of this, she meant that she hadn’t planned on seeing him again. She hadn’t planned on seeing _any_ of them again. Not Matt Murdock, not Luke Cage, not Danny Rand. They’d saved New York, blah blah blah, yay teamwork. What the fuck ever. But it was a one-time thing. She had zero intention of hanging out with them afterwards.

There was just one problem. That first guy? Matt Murdock, AKA Daredevil, AKA Spanx? He literally lived two goddamn streets over from her place. Hell’s Kitchen was _not_ that big, something she hadn’t thought about until she started seeing him _goddamn everywhere._ At the corner store. Walking down the same street. Walking past her office to go get coffee or something. She tried not to make it weird, because she _knew_ it was coincidence. He’d been there longer than she had. He’d probably been hitting up the same places his entire life. She just hadn’t noticed him because she didn’t _know_ him.

 _No one pays attention to the blind guy._ He’d said that once during their team-up. Jessica hadn’t been sure about it then, but she sure as fuck believed it now. He really tested the limits of her paranoia when he started showing up at the same Laundromat she went to. It wasn’t just that they were at the same Laundromat; it was that they were using it at the same godforsaken hour (anywhere between two and five in the morning, depending).

The first few times it happened, he didn’t say anything to her. There was no way Matt couldn’t have known she was there. He knew all kinds of weird, freaky shit. He could probably tell it was her because of her soap or her heartbeat or whatever. Jessica figured he must’ve taken her comment about how she never wanted to work with them again to heart. Normally, she’d be glad she didn’t have to tell someone to fuck off, again. This time, it just made the whole experience even more freaky and surreal.

One night, he came in with a face that was 50% bruise and 25% scrape. She figured that was as good an excuse to talk to him as any.

“What the fuck happened to you?”

Matt looked up, but not at her. Even knowing that he was blind didn’t make that any less weird. “…Jessica?” he said, in what was a _terrible_ attempt at feigning innocence.

“Don’t be an asshole. You know it’s me.”

Points to Matt: he at least had the decency to drop the act immediately. “Yeah, I did. Sorry. I…didn’t want to make it weird.”

“Too late. Seriously, what the fuck happened?”

“What happened with wh-oh.” Matt gently touched his own face, like he’d forgotten the injuries were there. His head tilted slightly before he spoke. “I…sort of got thrown out of a moving vehicle.”

She should’ve been used to hearing shit like that. Her life had gotten _really_ weird, _really_ goddamn fast. But no, hearing the blind man say _I got thrown out of a moving vehicle_ , completely straight-faced, was too weird for her. “Are you shitting me?”

“Jessica, the only other person in this Laundromat is asleep and you know everything. I have no reason to lie to you right now."

“…okay, fair enough.” Jessica glanced over her shoulder at the guy behind the counter. Asleep, just like Matt said. That was some shit security, but what else did she expect from a dive like this? “How are you going to explain _that_? Not exactly something you can brush over by saying you _tripped._ ”

“Oh, you’d be surprised.” Matt chuckled quietly. “I mean, Foggy already knows everything, so I can tell him the truth. If anyone else asks, I’ll…say a cab clipped me. Or that I was careless. That’s not even a lie.”

Jessica didn’t know a lot about Matt Murdock, but that comment fit into what she _did_ know: that he existed on a diet of rage, half-truths, and organic fruit. Not that she had any right to judge, seeing how her diet mostly consisted of vodka, sarcasm, and bullshit. “You _should_ be more careful,” she said, trying to sound flippant instead of worried. She wasn’t his mom. She couldn’t scold him into behaving. “No one’s going to take you seriously as a lawyer if you look like roadkill.”

“You say that as though people take me seriously as a lawyer.” His small smile widened a bit as he held up a t-shirt. “Hey, what color is this?

Jessica was caught on the smile at first. Matt had _barely_ smiled when they first met. Sure, he _smiled_ , but they were mostly fake, forced charming smiles that were so transparent she was surprised more people didn’t see right through them. Real smiles were rare. This was a real smile.

That made the shirt he was holding up even more fucking ridiculous.

“You mean _what color was it originally_ or _what color is it now?_ Because it was light blue, but I’d say it’s mostly _blood_ now.”

“…so, I should wash it with the darks is what you’re getting at?”

 _Christ_ , this guy. “Yeah. Whatever floats your boat, Murdock.”

He laughed. She’d never heard him really laugh before then, either.

Jessica didn’t hate it. She didn’t really know what to think of it but she knew she didn’t hate it.

 

_Two:_

Matt took that interaction as permission to start talking to her at the Laundromat. He still didn’t say _hi_ to her every time they happened across each other in public, which she was grateful for. That would’ve been too fucking weird. But their conversations at the Laundromat turned into _actual_ conversations. He wasn’t there every night she was, but when he was, they talked about Matt being in the news again, or how Foggy was doing, or how Trish was doing. They didn’t really talk about how _they_ were doing. She was fine with that. How she was doing was none of his fucking business, and she wasn’t billing him for therapy hours. But she had gotten pretty good at gauging where peoples’ heads were at, and she saw enough of him to notice a few trends.

He seemed different. It was difficult to describe how. She had to mentally compare the Matt who’d been coming to the Laundromat with the Matt she’d first met at the police station—the Matt she’d worked with when everything went right to shit. He’d been…okay, he’d been fucked. He’d been super fucked, if she was being honest. It wasn’t just Matt’s lack of smiling that had clued her in. It was everything. It was how tired he’d looked all the time, the 5 o’clock shadow he’d always sported, the constant frown. It was the way he’d gone quiet and distant after that fight in Midland, then vanished without telling anyone. It was the fact that she’d found him in a cemetery, trying to dig up his ex-girlfriend’s grave with his bare hands, frantic and screaming about how he _had to know, he had to **know.**_

It was the way he’d gone quiet and distant again when Elektra Natchios’s grave _had_ been empty.

It was the fact that she was pretty fucking sure he was suicidal, or else just _stupid_ , because he’d then proceeded to let his brainwashed and crazy ex point a sword at him. Sure, she hadn’t _actually_ stabbed him (and Jessica, unlike a lot of people, had been willing to forgive the whole _brainwashed and crazy_ bit because…well, shit, how could she _not_ ), but it had been a fucking big risk. Big risks were practically Murdock’s middle name.

Jessica didn’t like it. And she hadn’t liked that look in Matt’s eyes. Half the time they were blank. That seemed like an obvious statement to make, seeing how he was blind and all, but Matt was an expressive person. He had a shit poker face. But sometimes he’d just look _dead_ , like the person inside him had just checked the fuck out.

Jessica knew what that looked like.

She didn’t see that look so much, these days. Sure, Matt was still taking stupid risks (like getting thrown out of a moving vehicle), but he didn’t mention letting people point weapons at him without putting up a fight. He was smiling more. Joking more. He didn’t look like he was going to drop dead from exhaustion or sheer misery any time soon. He still looked tired, but shit, who didn’t these days? Jessica knew she looked tired 24/7, and she was still here. She wasn’t going to push him about it.

There were other things she couldn’t keep her mouth shut about, though. Out of all of them, Matt was the closest to an actual, full-blown, Avengers style _superhero_. And she had to know. She had to know.

“I gotta know.”

Matt tilted his head towards her. “…okay?”

“How do you wash out the Spanx?”

Matt snorted, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “Uh, wipe down and air dry, mostly. It really depends on how messy things got. Melvin’s going to have a fit if he hears you calling it that, you know.”

Jessica shrugged. “Melvin doesn’t like me, anyway.”

“That’s not true.”

“How do you know?”

“I see him…once a month, at least. We talk all the time.”

“What, and he’s out there singing my praises?”

“Well, no, but…” Matt trailed off and leaned against the washing machine, his fingers drumming against the side. “He doesn’t _dislike_ you. He doesn’t really how to react to things, sometimes, so he takes you at face value when you’re…uhm…”

He grimaced. Jessica didn’t have to look too hard to see it. “Myself?” she filled in the gap.

“I wouldn’t go that far. You have a different way of interacting with people and he doesn’t know that you don’t mean it when you’re brusque.”

“What makes you think I don’t mean it?”

“Well, you’ve called me an idiot, insulted my suit, sighed at me so many times I lost count, but…” He gestured between them. “Here we are, right?”

He had a point. Damn it.

“Anyway, he isn’t sure how to take it, so he doesn’t really know what to make of you. I told him you don’t hate him. That was all he needed to know.” Matt’s left hand—the hand furthest away from her—fiddled with something. It looked like a rubber band or maybe a hair tie. He kept stretching it between his fingers. “He’s a good guy.”

Jessica believed him. Melvin had the build of a pro wrestler but none of the attitude to back it up. Apparently he’d beat up Matt the first time they’d met, but Jessica couldn’t hold that against him. _She’d_ almost beat up Matt the first time they met. Danny actually _had_ beat up Luke when they’d first met and last she’d checked, they were best fucking buddies. Getting into fights didn’t mean shit for people like them. “Just don’t introduce him to Trish, okay? She might try to get me back in that Jem suit.”

Matt’s eyebrows shot up again. “I’m sorry, the what now?”

“The Jem suit. Or maybe it was Jewel, I can’t remember. She got this idea in her head when…” _When I decided I was going to help people._ For all the good it had done her. “She thought I should have a suit, so she got like a…mockup or whatever made. I would’ve looked like a cheap themed stripper.”

“Oh, c’mon, it can’t have been that bad.”

“It had a strapless top and there was a bigass diamond on the belt.”

Matt laughed, startled. “Okay, never mind. I guess it can be. What color?”

“Shit, I don’t remember. I think it was mostly white.”

“Oh, _no._ ” Despite his words, he sounded delighted—like the idea of something that shitty gave him a weird sense of joy. _Schadenfreude_. She was pretty sure that was what it was called. “That’s a _terrible_ color for this. You’d never get the stains out.”

“The whole thing was a terrible idea. Can you picture me in a suit?”

Wait. Was that an asshole thing to ask a blind guy? Apparently not, because Matt didn’t seem offended by the question. He just shook his head. “Not a _suit._ But you could get-” He was cut off by the sudden, loud beeping of the washing machine he was leaning against. Matt flinched like a gun had gone off next to his ear. “You could get a fancier jacket.”

“A fancier jacket?”

“Yeah, like…” He opened the machine and started pulling out his wash, transferring them to a nearby dryer. “Embroidered on the back or with a patch or whatever. Like a biker, but it says _Jessica Jones_ or _Alias Investigations_ or something. That could work.”

“Eh.”

“Not feeling it?”

“I just don’t want a look. I don’t need a look.”

“That’s fair. Do you ever worry these things are going to catch on fire?”

Jessica’s eyes tracked the clothes as he tossed them into the dryer. Whites, from the look of it. “No. Should I?”

“I mean, there’s one on the right wall that’s kind of…”

“Oh, _shit_.”

“What?”

He wasn’t sure what possessed her to do it. It was a major asshole move. But Matt hadn’t seemed to mind her being an asshole up until now. Maybe she was pushing her luck, seeing what was _acceptable_ in this…whatever the fuck it was. “I think you got something red mixed in there,” she said, putting on her best concerned tone.

Matt started at her wide-eyed. After a few seconds, something seemed to kick in. And he _smiled_. “Jessica Jones.”

 _Right. Walking lie detector._ She kept the act up anyway. “What?”

“Are you really trying to trick a poor, innocent blind man?” His smile widened to a grin. “That’s _horrible_.”

“ _Right._ Poor, innocent, blind Matt Murdock.” She plucked a sock out of his washing machine at threw it at his head. He caught it easily. “Show-off.”

“Hey, I have to get my kicks somehow.” He tossed it over his shoulder and into the dryer. “If I can’t enjoy the little things, what’s the point?”

“Weirdo.”

“Yep.” He dumped the last of his whites into the washing machine and started it up. “Do you still have the suit?”

“No. _God_ no.” Trish might, in a box somewhere, but that was a secret Jessica was taking to her fucking grave. “And even if I did, I’m not going to parade it around. It’s hideous.”

“Hey, I wouldn’t know the difference.”

Jessica rolled her eyes. “You’d want to touch it. You don’t get to touch my suit.”

“ _Fine_.” He dragged the word out a few syllables, like a whiny toddler. He was still smiling, though—not genuinely upset she was keeping the suit from him. Just being a little shit. “I won’t ask Trish about it.”

“ _Good_. I might have to kill you if you did.”

“That’s what I figured.”

She realized she was smiling at Matt, even though he couldn’t see it. Maybe he could hear it. Matt picked up a lot more than you’d think.

It should’ve freaked her out. It kind of did freak her out. Mostly because she didn’t mind the fact that he might know she was smiling at him.

_It takes some of the edge off. At least now he knows you were just fucking with him._

But he always seemed to know that, too. Smile or not.

Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as he acted sometimes.

 

_Three:_

He kept coming back. They kept chatting. His mood seemed to get better the more she saw him, but sometimes he was better in a weird way. There was a stretch for a couple weeks where he seemed off—energetic, more chipper than she’d ever seen him, talking a million miles a minute about this thing or that thing that was going around the Kitchen. He seemed happy, but happy in a way that wasn’t tainted by an underlying sense of weariness. Happy in a way that set off her fuckery radar.

Normally, she’d think she was an asshole for thinking there was something wrong. She should’ve been happy he was happy. She kind of was happy about it, if only because his near-constant pessimism could get exhausting, even for her. But she knew Matt—well, she knew him better than she had. And she was pretty sure this wasn’t normal Matt behavior. He was too relentlessly optimistic for a guy who’d seemed on the verge of snapping not even a few months ago. Sure, things had been looking up for him, but you didn’t go from paranoid and quiet to sunshine and rainbows in a few months. She knew that better than most people.

It didn’t completely remind her of Trish when Trish was using. But there were enough common notes that it made her nervous; the energy even at ass o’clock in the morning, the constant stream of chatter, the way he seemed to be constantly moving whenever he talked, little things like that. She tried to tell herself that it wasn’t her business, that the guy who’d refused strong painkillers while talking about opioid addiction wasn’t going to start using, that he cared too much about his legal career to do something illegal, and that there was _no_ way he was _that stupid_. That last one was especially unconvincing. She wondered if she should ask him about it, but shit, how did you ask someone if they were using? Or why they seemed happier than usual, like it was a bad thing?

_I could ask if he got laid lately._

Jessica decided against that, only because she didn’t really want to know the answer.

She was still wondering if she should bring it up that particular night. It was a Thursday, about two in the morning. Jessica noticed the look on Matt’s face the second he walked in. He looked like shit—more than you’d expect from a guy who was awake at this hour. His only greeting to her was a mumbled _hey_ , and once he got that out of the way he didn’t say a damn thing.

_Ah, shit, what happened?_

After two, three weeks of him being Mr. Sunshine, something must have happened. Jessica doubted it was physical; she’d seen how he reacted to getting beat to shit, and he’d never reacted like this. Was it something  with him and Foggy? She knew they’d had a few rough patches, but from what Matt had been telling her, they were trying to work things out. They were even working on getting their practice started back up (though Jessica suspected Foggy was doing it just to get away from dealing with her and Danny). Then again, shit could change in a heartbeat. That was something else she knew better than most people.

_Guess now is as good a time as any to intrude._

“You look like shit.”

Matt stopped. He had his back to her, so all she could see was how tense his shoulders went. She wished she could see his face. Working out what he was feeling would be easy if he would just _turn around_. “You’re not…hurt, are you? Should I be calling Claire right now?”

“…no. Claire can’t help me with this.”

That was a more honest answer than she’d expected. It gave her a bit of a push. “Look, uhm…” She cleared her throat. “I get that talking is shitty, and you don’t have to say anything to me if you don’t want. But…”

“I got diagnosed with bipolar.”

 _Oh. Oh, shit._ She hadn’t expected him to actually _talk_. Matt was as tight-lipped as they came, and it wasn’t like they were _close_ or anything. But apparently he’d decided to do a complete 180 on that, because now he wouldn’t _stop_ talking. “Bipolar II and anxiety. I’ve been talking to someone, because…I was sick of being angry or numb all the time and I knew it might make things easier with me and Foggy, you know? But I mostly did it I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I always thought…I always _knew_ about the depression, but as it turns out, _surprise!_ I’m completely crazy…”

“You’re not crazy,” Jessica interrupted. “Having bipolar doesn’t make you crazy, c’mon. I thought you were some kind of genius.”

“I graduated summa from _law school,_ big fucking deal.” She wasn’t too scandalized hearing him swear—he’d contributed just as much as she had to Luke’s stupid fucking swear jar. The frustration in his voice was throwing her off, though. It was throwing her off a lot. “Not like it’s done me anything. Jess, you were _there_. You saw me try to dig up a dead body.”

There was no way to say she didn’t judge him for the incident that didn’t involve revealing some of _her_ secrets. There were some things she was _super_ not ready to tell him about, and probably never would be. Kilgrave was at the top of that list. But she couldn’t say _nothing_ —not when she knew what being scared and needing answers felt like. “Okay, so you snapped a little…”

“I didn’t _snap a little_ , Jessica.”

“Fine. You snapped a lot. But you’re seeing someone, right?” After a pause, Matt nodded. “And you’re trying to fix it? Because those are your options. Pretend nothing’s wrong or make it right.”

He didn’t answer at first. Jessica half-expected him to make a run for it. He _looked_ like he was about to make a run for it. But he didn’t. He spoke, finally, so quietly that Jessica almost couldn’t hear him over the washers:

“I haven’t told Foggy yet. I don’t know how…” He glanced over his shoulder. The frown was back; if she didn’t know any better, she’d say he looked scared, too. “…I don’t know how to tell him.”

This was getting stickier by the second. Jessica didn’t know how to handle this stuff. It was like she’d told Trish: she couldn’t do that thing where she made people feel better. She didn’t know _how_. There was one thing she knew how to do, but it might make things worse

_…fuck it._

“You could get a cake. Put _hey I’ve got bipolar_ on the top. They make cakes for that, right?”

Good news: Matt laughed. It was the kind of laughter that came after you heard a _really_ offensive joke, but couldn’t help laughing even though you knew it was wrong. “I… _shit_ , I don’t know?!” He leaned against the washing machines and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was still smiling—tired and anxious, but a smile. “Probably. _Jesus_.” He let go of his nose and shrugged. “I mean…he _does_ like cake. Might make things go easier.”

“See? There you go.” Jessica hesitated before moving to lean against the washing machines next to him. “You don’t think he’s going to get weird about it, do you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t. The rational part of my brain is telling me one thing but the anxiety is telling me something else, and it’s a _mess_ …” His hand dropped from his eyes. “I’m working on it, but it turns out dealing with twenty years of shit after shoving it under the bed all that time is harder than it sounds.”

He looked tired again—pre-teamup tired, the scary kind of tired. _I can’t do that thing where I make you feel better. I don’t know how._ But _God_ she wished she did sometimes. Jessica nudged him gently. “At least you’re trying.  Do you feel like it’s helping? The therapy?”

“I mean, it felt like pulling teeth by hand at first, but…yeah. My therapist is great. Her name’s Julianne Burke. She’s nice.”

 _Julianne._ Not the woman Jessica had seen when Trish had talked her into it. “I’m glad. I tried that whole thing, it didn’t really work for me.”

“Yeah? How come?”

_Because it was kind of hard to talk about how I was raped by a man who can control minds._

But Matt didn’t know about that, and she didn’t want him to. Not now, preferably not ever. “You know me. I’m too prickly for human interaction. I think I scared mine off.”

Matt chuckled again. At least it sounded genuine. “I don’t think you’re too prickly.”

“Shut up.”

“I mean it.”

“Didn’t I cuss you out first time we met?”

“In fairness, I _did_ kind of show up without warning and strong arm my way into your interrogation. You know, you _really_ shouldn’t…”

“Talk to the cops without a lawyer, I _know_.” He’d stressed that to all of them, repeatedly. Jessica elbowed him again, a bit harder this time. “I’ll keep that in mind, _Mom._ ”

Matt elbowed her right back, though more gently than she had. “Hey, I’m just looking out for you. We’re team-mates, remember?”

“Say that again and I’m stealing your fabric softener.”

Matt laughed. She thought she saw some of the stress leave his shoulders. Shit. Who knew that he might actually be _comforted_ by her whole _being an asshole_ thing? “Look, if Nelson has a problem with you being bipolar, then that’s on him. People make shit work with that kind of thing all the time. Carrie Fisher had it.” She noticed a puzzled look on his face and remembered, too late, that Matt didn’t really know actors. “Princess Leia.”

“Oh. _Oh_. I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, she wrote a book about it. Trish has read it like, fifty times. But you can…probably make it work. I’m pretty sure you’re the second most put together of us.”

Matt shook his head immediately. “That’s just me faking it. But thanks for believing in me.”

 _That’s just me faking it._ That was the most weirdly frank thing he’d said to her since they’d met. “Yeah, no problem. Just take care of yourself, okay?”

“I will.”

“I mean it.”

“I _will_.”

“That means no more getting thrown out of moving cars.”

“Okay, I can’t promise that.”

Yeah, that was what she thought.

 

_Four:_

Things were different after that.

They weren’t immediately, obviously different. But Matt started talking more about himself—slowly, never _too_ much, but he started giving her little updates on how his therapy was going. Shit like that. He _really_ started talking more when he got put on medication, which sounded like a bitch and a half before they found the right combo. “You know what the hardest part is?” he said one night.

“No, what’s the hardest part?”

“Remembering to take the damn things. I didn’t know I was so _forgetful_.” He stopped for a second, running his fingers over a spot on a hoodie. Could he _feel_ stains now? Jessica guessed that made sense, depending on the stain. “Foggy isn’t shocked I’m so forgetful.”

 _Foggy._ It felt like Jessica had been seeing more and more of him around the Kitchen, too. Maybe it was because he’d started hanging out with Matt more outside of work, or maybe she’d subconsciously been keeping an eye out for him so she could corner him and give him a lecture about how to treat people who needed help. The only thing that had stopped her was the knowledge that it was _probably_ an asshole thing to lecture a near-stranger about, that Foggy probably wouldn’t listen to her because again, she was _pretty_ sure he hated her, and that it would probably piss Matt off. She wasn’t sure why the last one mattered so much to her. “He’s still taking all of this okay?”

“Yeah, he’s been great. Uhm, actually, I don’t know if I mentioned this, but when I told him, he…” Matt shook his head. “He didn’t seem too shocked, actually. I guess everything was obvious to everyone but me, huh?”

“That’s usually how it works.” It was always easiest to trick yourself about these things. Jessica tried to be up front with herself about her own bullshit, but she’d let herself believe it before. It never ended well. “But you’re all getting along and everything?”

“Yeah. I think he’s just happy I’m getting help. He’s still kind of weird about…the Devil, but we’re working through that, too. He just worries about me.”

“He _should_ worry about you.”

“He doesn’t have…” Matt swatted her hand away when she went to poke his ribs. “ _Don’t_.”

“How many this time?”

“Wh— _none_.” He sounded a bit indignant. No, he sounded a lot indignant, but like he was trying to hide how indignant he was (and failing). “It’s just a bruise. It’s not even a big bruise.”

Jessica didn’t say anything, but he must’ve correctly read her silence as a skeptical stare. Matt rolled his eyes behind the sunglasses and pulled up his shirt. He hadn’t been lying—the bruise wasn’t very big, about the size of a nickel in the center, but more quarter-sized with the lighter, already-healed parts around the edges. It was actually weirdly round for a bruise, she realized. “What the hell caused that?”

“Baseball.”

“You’re _shitting_ me.”

“I am not shitting you. The suit took most of the impact, but not enough. I wasn’t even fighting that guy. I was going after the guy who was mugging him, but you know, guy in a devil mask, middle of the night in New York…”

Jessica snorted noisily. She wasn’t even surprised by that explanation. Getting beat up by the guy he was trying to save sounded exactly like something that would happen to Matt. “People are so ungrateful.”

“Good thing I don’t do this for gratitude.”

That wouldn’t be the weirdest bruise story he’d share as the days went on. Turned out that Matt was the kind of guy who ended up beat up without knowing how; she found him poking at a bruise on his shin one time, an ugly brown-and-yellow one that he had _no_ idea how he’d gotten. She’d worry that he had brain damage or that he was keeping shit from her to avoid seeing a doctor, but Matt didn’t usually lie about his bruises. He didn’t have a reason to with her—she already _knew_. And the mystery bruises were generally in places where people got mystery bruises, like his shins. One time he bruised his foot because he’d gotten startled by a loud noise and dropped a pill bottle on it. He actually beat up his forearm screwing around with a rubber band; the fucking masochist had taken to snapping it against his skin “to distract himself.” That was the only explanation he’d given; fortunately his therapist had put a stop to that before Jessica had to intervene and make sure he hadn’t passed from _distraction_ to _serious self-harm_.

She didn’t know _why_ she’d felt compelled to intervene when she’d found out what he’d done. She wasn’t his mom or his babysitter. He wasn’t her problem. Jessica tried not to think about it too much.

That got hard when Matt started showing up less.

She would’ve worried, but she still caught glimpses of him during the day. He didn’t look badly hurt, and he’d talked about how he needed to get more sleep anyway. Maybe he was actually working on finally getting over the sleeplessness that drove people like them to do laundry at fuck o’clock a.m.

That was a good thing. She was happy for him. She was.

And she definitely didn’t occasionally think about how quiet it was at the Laundromat without him, or wonder how he was doing.

_Christ, Jones, you live in the same neighborhood. Just go find him._

But she put that off, too, because that felt like admitting to him personally that she missed talking to him. Jessica wasn’t going to go that far. In the end, though, like that night in the Laundromat, the opportunity was dropped in her lap. It happened when she went to take the subway. She had a job to do uptown. Jessica was messing with her camera when she caught sight of him. She had to take a second glance, but it was definitely Matt Murdock. She’d know those brooding shoulders anywhere. He looked more miserable than she’d ever seen him before, and she’d seen him beat half to death by ninjas. Jessica approached carefully. He looked skittish on top of everything else; she was worried he might start swinging if she snuck up on him. “I didn’t know you took the subway,” Jessica said once she got closer.

Matt’s head snapped up. He relaxed once he realized it was her. “…yeah, I don’t usually,” he said. His voice was strained. “But hey, guy’s gotta do what a guy’s…”

Whatever he was about to say was drowned out by the sound of a train. Jessica looked up to see if it was her train. It wasn’t; it was the train across the way. When she looked back at Matt, he was sitting there with his head between his legs, like he was about to throw up. “Hey, hey, easy…” Jessica sat down next to him and rested a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but didn’t move away. “Don’t throw up in public.”

“’m not gonna.”

“You’re not okay, are you?”

“No, no, I’m not.”

“Great.” She kept rubbing his shoulder until the train left. “Too loud?”

“Not just that.”

“Okay, then, walk me through it. What’s wrong?”

“I’m in a pressure cooker of sensations.” He lifted his head slowly. It was impossible to miss how nauseous he looked. “Too many smells. Too much noise. It’s all echoing off the walls.”

“Should’ve grabbed earplugs.”

“That’d be worse. If I can’t hear, I can’t get around as well. And it doesn’t help, it just…” A cluster of teenage boys walked past, trailing noisy chatter and body spray smell that even Jessica could pick up in their wake. Matt’s grip on his cane tightened as they did. “…makes the sounds bad in a different way. _Fuck_.”

“You’re lucky Luke didn’t hear that.”

Matt let out a strangled laugh. “I’d like to see him try to use that thing on me outside the shop. I will lawyer him into submission.”

“You know, I think I’d like to see that, too.” That got another laugh out of Matt, though he didn’t look any less green. “Where are you headed?”

“Harlem. Figured it’d be cheaper to take the train but I should’ve taken a cab…” Matt ducked his head again. “You?”

“Washington Heights. You sure you’re gonna make it to Harlem?”

“If I’m being honest, no, but I’ll live.”

He didn’t look like he’d live. His hands were gripping the cane so tightly his knuckles had gone white. Matt had been thrown through a window when they first met; _this_ seemed to bother him more.

_Shit._

“You want me to go with?”

Matt lifted his head again. He looked surprised by the offer. “You don’t have to…”

“It’s the same train. It’s fine. Whatever.” _Just don’t make this a thing, okay?_

Matt seemed to pick up on her thought. After a second, he nodded and smiled. “Thanks, Jess.”

That was kind of making it a thing, but she let it slide.

Jessica sat next to him in silence until their train pulled up. Matt grabbed her elbow as it pulled into the station and didn’t let go as they stood and got on. Jessica was able to find them seats, though she had a feeling that didn’t make the train any less shitty for Matt. _He_ seemed to be trying to take up as little space as possible, and still keeping a solid grip on her elbow. It wasn’t making her uncomfortable yet, but it felt like one of those things that _could_ if it kept going for too long. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, hoping that gave off good enough _please let go of me_ vibes.

It must have, because Matt let go of her elbow and went back to clutching his cane. As the trip went on, he ducked his head, burying his face into the collar of his jacket. Trying to mask the smells, maybe. There was a woman further down the cart with a hot dog that had more toppings than usual. Who put that much shit on a hot dog? “It’s not too much further,” she said. Jessica went back to rubbing his shoulder. That frown was going to be permanently etched into his face at this point. “Really that bad?”

Matt nodded. “I’ll be okay once I’m out,” he said, his voice muffled by his jacket. “Are you sure it’s not far?”

“I’m…pretty sure.” Shit, what was their last stop? Now she wished she hadn’t said that. “What can I do?” There had to be something.

Matt hesitated before holding out his hand. Jessica wasn’t sure what he was going for, but she took it. Almost immediately, his grip shifted, fingers resting over her wrist. As she watched, his breathing leveled out, slowly, like he was making himself do it. Whatever weird thing he was getting out of feeling her wrist (her pulse, she realized after a second, he was feeling for her pulse), it seemed to calm him down. His frown became less pained and more focused. It was an improvement, she guessed. As long as he didn’t throw up on her.

The train pulled up in Harlem. Jessica nudged Matt gently and stood up. “This is you.”

She had never seen anyone look so relieved in her life. Matt stood and made a run for the door, letting go of her wrist as he went. Before he stepped out, he turned around long enough to smile in her direction. “Thanks!”

“Yeah, no problem,” she called back after him. Jessica would’ve worried that he didn’t hear her, but it _was_ Matt. She tried to see if she could catch a glimpse of him in the windows as the train pulled away, but he was lost in the crowds of people.

She kept thinking about the look on his face as she sat back down and waited for her stop. She thought at first that it was because she’d never seen that much gratitude on his face before. Then she realized she had—in the graveyard, when she’d finally stopped trying to drag him out of Elektra Natchios’s grave and said she’d help him check. She thought about how he’d looked at her in that moment—like her helping him dig up a body was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him.

Like sitting on the train with him and letting him hold her wrist was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him.

Genuine gratitude.

She found herself wishing they’d been able to talk more. He’d been in rough state, so it was hard to tell if this was a one-time thing because the subway fucked him up _that_ bad, or if he was backsliding. _And why do I care if he is? I’m not his mother._

But she did care. She cared for the same reason that she cared about what happened to Malcolm and Trish. Because she actually _liked_ having that weirdo around.

Fuck. She was going to check up on him later, wasn’t she?

 _Fuck_. When had this happened?

 

_Five:_

Matt took a cab home that day. She knew because she’d actually offered to take the subway back with him if he needed it. In hindsight, she was pretty sure _I’ll take a cab_ was code for _I’m gonna just parkour it off_ , because that was exactly the kind of bullshit Matt Murdock pulled on a regular basis. Still, if it meant he didn’t puke in public—specifically, if it meant he didn’t puke in public on her—she figured it couldn’t hurt.

She had planned on hunting him down later, just to be _sure_ that he was okay (again, she couldn’t figure out when him being okay had mattered so fucking much, but it did, fuck it). But, as if the universe was playing some kind of joke on her, once again, _he_ came to _her_. Specifically, he texted her at two in the morning on a Friday (technically a Saturday). Just two words: _You awake._

 _yeah why_ , she texted back.

_Do you have a first aid kit_

“What the fuck _now?_ ” she muttered as she replied again: _yeah but theres not much in it. why?_

_Can I come over_

Jessica’s eyebrows shot up. _i mean i dont have pants on and im not putting them on for you but sure_

 _You might want to put them on for Foggy,_ was Matt’s reply, followed quickly by, _Thanks Jess_

It took Jessica a solid minute to debate the pros and cons of putting on pants for Foggy. She ultimately decided to do it, because she didn’t have the energy to deal with Foggy’s _why are you people like this_ face.

It ended up being a waste of time, because when Matt and Foggy did finally show up, Foggy was visibly tipsy.

“…what in the goddamn…” Did he have a black eye too?! “What did you _do?!_ ”

“I hate this city,” Foggy groaned. “I hate it.”

“No, you don’t.” Matt smiled at Jessica sheepishly. He looked completely stone cold sober and had no visible injuries that Jessica could see. What kind of weird bizarro dimension shit was she looking at? “Sorry…your place is closer to Josie’s than mine, and I sort of wanted to…” He held up his right hand. One of his fingers was red and swollen. “Get this splinted as fast as possible.”

Okay. That made more sense.

“Yeah, I think I’ve got shit for that. And…” She stood aside to let them in. “Ice. Seriously…”

“Someone had too much to drink and started getting aggressive. My esteemed college, Franklin Nelson, Esquire…” Foggy groaned and buried his face in Matt’s shoulder. “…tried to talk him down and…well.”

“And what, you busted up your hand defending Foggy’s honor?” Jessica gently pulled Foggy away from Matt and to the sofa. He collapsed onto it with an _oomph_. “I thought you were better than that, Murdock.”

“He got shoved and tried to grab the bar on his way down,” Foggy said. He gingerly poked at the bruise on his face. He’d seemed so put together when he worked with Jeri, even with the long hair. _Now_ look at him. “Man, first night back at that shit-hole and this happens. It’s a sign, Matt. I’m no longer welcome.”

Matt laughed. “Yeah, that’s what happens when you go uptown and drink fancy liqueur in nice bars. You forget your roots. Lose your eel strength.”

Jessica wasn’t even going to ask what that meant. “I’ll get your ice. _God_ ,” she added under her breath as she walked away. It was too damn late for this (technically too damn early _but_ whatever). “You just wanna strap that thing to another finger?”

“Yeah, that’ll probably do it. It’s not broken or dislocated, just sprained.”

 _Just sprained_. Right. Jessica figured there was about a 50/50 chance he wasn’t bullshitting her with that, but she could always double-check before he bandaged it. She assembled an ice pack for Foggy and grabbed the first aid kit; when she came back into the front room, Matt was sitting next to Foggy on the couch, one hand on his shoulder. They were talking in low voices, Foggy muttering something about a headache, Matt quietly sympathizing. Jessica realized then that she hadn’t actually seen them together as _friends_. She knew they were, or they had been, and that when she’d first met Matt they were on the outs with each other because of some bullshit that had happened that broke up the firm. By the end of the experiment in teamwork that the newspapers were still calling _the Defenders_ ( _God_ , she hated that), they seemed to be…not _better_ , but trying to be. Trying to remember what they used to be like. Even now, it seemed like they weren’t completely back in the groove (she knew what that looked like because she’d lived it), but it was an improvement. It was something.

She ruined the moment by tossing the ice pack directly at them. “Here.” Matt caught it easily with his uninjured hand and passed it to Foggy. “You want help with your finger?”

“Please.” Matt kept a hand on Foggy’s shoulder as he stood. “I bet that thing is going to look super-impressive tomorrow.”

“I’m gonna look like I got beat up on the playground,” Foggy whined as he pressed the ice pack against the bruise.

“Nah, you’re gonna look badass.” Matt walked away from Foggy and to Jessica. “Good news is, I’m not right-handed,” he said as he held out his hand to her.

“Lucky you.” Jessica didn’t even bother trying to check for a break discreetly; she just up and checked, which elicited a longsuffering sigh from Matt. “Don’t give me that shit. You sure it’s not fractured?”

Matt shook his head. “Trust me, I’d be able to feel it if it were. Fractures grind. It’s gross.”

 _I’ll bet_. It didn’t feel dislocated, either, so she guessed he hadn’t been downplaying his injuries, for once. Jessica pulled the wrap bandage out of the first aid kit and started on the fingers. Matt winced slightly at the first touch. “Sorry.”

“I’ve had worse. Hey, uh…”

Jessica glanced up at him. It felt like he was trying to look right at her; like he knew where her eyes _probably_ were but was having a hard time figuring out the specifics. “I don’t think I really thanked you for the other day,” he said quietly.

 _Oh, shit, he’s making it a thing._ Jessica shrugged and focused on his fingers again. “It was no problem.”

“Still. It meant a lot. Thank you.”

He sounded so genuine, so _gentle_. Jessica was able to mumble out a _you’re welcome_ , but that was about it. When she glanced up at Matt again, he was smiling. She could see the wrinkles forming at the corners of his eyes.

“Hey, are you okay?” he added, just as she looked away to grab the tape.

 _Oh, fuck, no, we are **not** doing this._ “I’m fine, why?” she asked, trying not to sound too defensive.

“You just sound kind of out of it. Can’t sleep?”

No, she could not, and there was no way she could hide that from him. But she could hide _why_ , and she would, because it wasn’t any of his fucking business. “Yeah, you know how it is. Life sucks and it won’t even let you get a few hours of oblivion.”

Matt laughed quietly. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Hey, do you, uhm…” He hesitated. She found herself hoping that he wouldn’t finish that thought, but he did: “Do you want me to stick around? I have to drop Foggy off at his place first, but I can come back if you don’t want to be-”

Jessica shook her head immediately. “I’m fine. It’s fine. You make sure he’s okay. Are you two going to be able to get _back_ okay?”

“Yeah, I’ve got him. It’s not that far, and if anyone gives us trouble…” Matt grinned. “Like I said. I’m not right-handed.”

“Don’t try to fight someone when you have a sprained finger. _Jesus_.” She checked to make sure the tape was secure before letting go of his hand. “And promise me you’re gonna see Claire about this.”

He rolled his eyes, though there was a smile on his face still. “I promise I’ll see Claire about this.”

“Good.” Jessica gently thumped his arm before stepping away. “I know where she lives. I can ask her myself.”

“Please, don’t.” Matt walked back over to Foggy. “You feeling okay?”

“’s not as bad as the time I got stabbed in the side.” Jessica almost interjected to ask what the fuck that meant, but decided that she probably didn’t want to know. “I’m gonna sleep for a week.”

“Gotta get you home before you can do that, buddy.” Matt helped Foggy to his feet. It was almost cute, seeing them lean on each other as they walked for the door. “Hey, thanks, Jessica.”

Jessica waved him off. “Just don’t die on your way home.”

“We won’t!” Matt said cheerfully.

“I hope,” Foggy added, much more grimly.

Matt tried to keep his laughter in check, but Jessica could still hear him chuckling to himself as he walked down the hall. Jessica moved to the window to make sure they got out of the building okay, and kept watching until they were out of sight down the street. _I could’ve gone with them_ , she thought, followed quickly by, _Why would I do that? They’re grownass adults. They don’t need me to walk them home._ She shook her head, put the first aid kit away, lay back down on her bed and nursed a bottle of whiskey. She tried, really hard, not to think about Matt Murdock.

He made that really hard when he texted her fifteen minutes later. _We’re both good. Thanks again_

Jesus. Was he always this grateful or was this something therapy had done to him? _no prob_ , she texted back. She half-expected to get another reply from him, asking if she was sure about the whole _him staying over_ thing, but the text never came. She couldn’t help feeling relieved. Jessica didn’t really care about Matt’s opinion, and he had no fucking right to judge her and her whiskey, anyway. But that didn’t mean she wanted him to see her like this. If tonight had proven anything, it was that he _would_ worry, and she didn’t need him to worry. That was Malcolm’s job.

She tried not to think about how she liked knowing that he did care. The whiskey helped with that, too.

 

_Six:_

She hadn’t actually seen him in the suit since their team-up. Not in person, anyway. He’d made the news a few times, but they didn’t really hang out while Matt was doing his vigilante thing, so she expected that she wasn’t going to see it at all.

Even if she had thought she’d see it again, she didn’t think she’d see it like _this_.

“Hey!”

Jessica’s gaze jerked up from the person she’d been watching. She expected to see a cop or the building’s landlord or something, but the _hey_ had been too friendly. And she was pretty sure security guards didn’t run around in devil costumes.

“I didn’t know you went out like this in daylight,” Jessica said.

“Is it daylight?” Matt grinned as he walked across the roof to join her. _God_ , the outfit looked even dumber in better lighting. “I didn’t notice. Having fun?”

“Oh, yeah. Watching someone eat a bagel at…” Jessica checked her watch. “6:30 in the morning is the height of entertainment. What are you doing out here, anyway? Don’t you have lawyer shit you should be getting to?”

“Nah. It’s a half day at the Law Offices of Nelson & Murdock, 2.0. I have time.” Matt crouched down at the edge of the roof next to her. “Which person eating a bagel?”

“What do you mean _which?_ ”

“There are two people outside with bagels. Unless you’re talking about someone inside, in which case we _might_ have a problem. It’s hard to pick out individual bagel eaters in a room full of other bagels.”

Jessica glanced his way again. “And you say you’re the normal one of the group.”

“I am. I’m the only one without superpowers.”

“What the hell do you call being able to smell the number of people eating bagels from a roof on the other side of the street?”

“Special talents. I can’t leap over tall buildings or stop cars with my bare hands.”

“Slow-moving cars. And she’s at the table right next to the door.” Jessica wasn’t sure if Matt could tell where the door was but he knew all kinds of weird shit. He’d probably be able to work it out if she gave him a second.

“…I don’t smell drugs. Or… _personal interactions_.” Jessica saw him grimace out of the corner of his eye. She was tempted to tell he could just say _she doesn’t smell like sex_ , or ask him how Mr. Catholic Boy knew what that smelled like. The uncomfortable look on his face deterred her, this time. “What’s this about?”

_Oh, you know. I just like to follow the guys who hire me for a bit to make sure they haven’t been brainwashed by a dead man._

There was no way in hell she was telling him that.

“Just being thorough. Due diligence and all that crap. I don’t want any surprises with my clients.”

Matt snorted quietly. “Yeah, I hear you. Never hurts to make sure they’re not going to screw you over later.”

“Is this about Frank Castle?”

“This is absolutely about Frank Castle.”

“Yeah, I could’ve told you that was a bad idea. _Anyone_ could’ve told you that was a bad idea.” Any humor faded when she saw the woman across the street answer her cell phone. Her mind started racing, going over everything she knew about the woman and the case. She wanted Jessica to find out of her dirtbag husband was cheating on her with the secretary, like some kind of damn movie cliché. Maybe it felt like a movie cliché because it was fake. Maybe the whole thing was a setup. Jessica tried to swallow past the ball of nerves that started forming in her chest. _Breathe, Jessica, breathe_ …

“It’s a friend.”

Shit. She’d actually forgotten Matt was there. “What?”

“She’s talking to a friend. They’re planning a lunch date or something. Are you okay?”

“I’m good.” Jessica took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m good.” And she was. Her heartbeat slowed down at Matt’s words, because she believed him. He might bullshit her about a lot of things, but she knew he wouldn’t bullshit her about this.

She _trusted_ him, a thought she had to shove onto the back burner so that she wouldn’t be so fucking distracted. But Jessica had to admit, she was weirdly comforting, considering she was crouched on a rooftop and stalking a woman while a guy in a devil costume eavesdropped on her conversation. _My fucking life, I swear to God._ “Are you sure you don’t want to get into the PI business?” she asked. “You’d probably be pretty good at it, with ears like that.”

“Nah. I’m too attached to being a lawyer. But…” He was grinning when Jessica glanced at him again. The mask should’ve made it creepy, but the smile was too bright and happy for that. “Thanks. I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Damn, he really did look happy.

Jessica shrugged and looked back at the woman again. “Yeah, well, don’t get used to it,” she said. “And don’t tell anybody, okay? I’ve got a reputation to keep up.”

“My lips are sealed. Promise. Have you got this one?”

She almost asked him to stay, because those ears really _were_ useful, and knowing whatever the lady was talking about would be helpful for her stalking session. But she wasn’t going to hold him up, either. “Yeah, I’m good. Thanks.”

Matt nodded and stood, taking a second to pat her on the shoulder before he left. “I should head out, then. I’ll have to get out of this thing eventually, right? See you later?”

“We live in the same neighborhood, so probably.”

Jessica glanced over her shoulder in time to see him jump to the next roof over. “ _God,_ ” she muttered under her breath as she turned her attention back to the woman. “Idiot.”

She wasn’t sure if she was talking about Matt or herself.

 

_Seven:_

In the end, that case went about as expected. Woman wasn’t Kilgrave’d. Her husband was cheating on her. Jessica got paid. Everything was fine. Sure, the woman flipped her shit and walked out of the office screaming about how she was going to sue, but for once she wasn’t talking about Jessica. Jessica couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for the poor asshole she’d ratted out. Sure, he was a creep sleeping with his younger secretary, but his soon-to-be ex-wife had murder her in eyes. There were few things in the world scarier than a pissed off white upper-middle-class suburban lady with nothing to lose.

Jessica kept thinking about what happened on the roof, though. It was actually kind of annoying.

What she’d said to Matt before he left ended up being prophetic. They did see each other again, in Hell’s Kitchen, because Matt was a nosy weirdo and that was one of the risks of living in the same neighborhood.

“Are you breaking and entering?”

Jessica stopped trying to jimmy open the window and glanced over her shoulder. Matt was standing at the bottom of the fire escape, head tilted up towards her, an amused smile on his face. “Actually, I was given a key, but it didn’t work,” Jessica said casually. “What, are you gonna call the cops?”

“Nah. You want a hand?”

“I thought you were a lawyer.”

“Yeah, well…” She heard a rattling sound; when she glanced down, he had jumped up into the ladder and was climbing up easily. He reminded her of a cat. “…I never said I was a good lawyer.”

“That’s fair.” Jessica went back to fiddling with the window. “I think I’ve got it. How’s your nose?”

“Not bad. Why?”

“Feel up to smelling a stranger’s apartment?”

Part of her regretted asking—no, not regretted. Didn’t know _why_. She’d meant it when she said she didn’t want to work with any of the boys again. But Matt’s super-senses thing _was_ pretty useful. And it wasn’t like she was teaming up with Daredevil to fight ninjas. She was teaming up with Matt Murdock to make part of her job easier.

Yeah, she didn’t buy that defense, either. Jessica was really glad she didn’t have to defend the decision to anyone but herself. Well, herself and Matt. But Matt didn’t seem up to questioning her motives. In fact, he looked downright pleased. “Sure, why not? I’ve got an hour. What are we looking for?”

“Don’t know yet.” With one final nudge, Jessica got the window unlocked and opened it. “This guy hired me to hunt down his brother. I guess he ran off and started getting involved with the wrong people. He wants to make sure he’s okay. Or alive.”

“And this is his place?”

“Yup. You’d be amazed what you can find out about a person from their shit.” She had to push her way past heavy curtains to get in, the kind people who worked night shifts generally used. The curtains swung back shut after Matt came in, plunging the room in almost complete darkness.

“Furniture on your right,” Matt said. “Watch your shins.”

“Thanks.” Jessica made her way to the opposing wall and, after a bit of fumbling, found the light switch. The furniture Matt warned her about was really a couple of cardboard boxes with a plank over it. _Saddest coffee table ever._ It was also one of the only pieces of furniture in the small living room. There was also a sofa that smelled like it came from a sketchy garage sale and a kitchen with barely anything on the counters. Either this guy was a neat freak, or he didn’t have much in the way of kitchen stuff. “What are you getting?” she asked Matt.

He was standing in front of the window, holding his folded-up cane close to his chest, his head twitching slightly. “Lot of food gone stale. Hasn’t taken out the trash in a few days. Uhm…” His nose wrinkled slightly. “It feels…musty in here. Lot of dust, but…humid, too, you know? I’m guessing either he hasn’t been here a while or…maybe he’s just not that tidy. The air in these places isn’t always great. Do you smell something off?”

Jessica took a deep breath. “Smells like your average bachelor pad to me.”

Matt shook his head. “No. There’s something else.” He unfolded the cane and started tapping around the room. Eventually, he found the bedroom door and stuck his head inside. “So, uhm, what are we doing in relation to finding any potentially illegal substances?”

“Pot or something stronger?”

“Pot.”

“Just leave it. Not our problem.” Jessica started poking around the kitchen. Matt was right; a lot of the food did look stale. There was mold starting to grow on the bread. Jessica closed the pantry and started digging through the trash bin. “Oh, _gross_.”

“What?”

“You weren’t kidding about the trash.” It was mostly fruit remnants, gone all mushy. She picked through them, anyway, nudging the fruit aside without touching it too much. “Don’t know how much is in here…oh, hello.” Half a business card. Jessica stopped to look at the half she had before she kept digging through the trash. There was the tail end of a phone number, and what looked like part of a name. There was also the tail end of a second name, this one hand-written, and another phone number written in the same number. The handwriting was atrocious. She put it on the counter and went back to digging in the trash. “Anything else in the bedroom?”

“Bed’s not made. Bathroom’s a mess.” Matt paused. She heard the sound of his cane as he came into the kitchen. He had that same pensive frown on his face. “He left his clothes lying on the floor. You really don’t smell that?”

“I don’t smell much of anything but banana peels right now, dude.” She found the other half of the business card. It was from a rehab center of some kind. If she had to guess, the name was someone who had referred him to the location. _Guess he changed his mind._ “What’s the deal?”

“I don’t know. It’s…do you know where I can get a glass?”

Weird question. Jessica searched a few drawers until she found a glass and passed it to Matt. “Why do you want a glass?”

In response, he went to the sink and filled the glass with water. He then proceeded to smell the water, which was…fucking weird, but okay. “What, is the mineral content higher in this place?” Jessica asked.

Matt didn’t answer. He kept sniffing at the glass, the baffled look on his face growing stronger with every smell. He put the glass down. “…do you think this place has a water tank?” he asked.

“Like, on the roof. Maybe. Why?”

“I want to check the water tank.”

“ _Why_?”

“There’s something wrong with the water. It smells like...don’t laugh but it smells like a morgue.”

She wanted to call him out for being ridiculous, but that didn’t sound like hyperbole. “Let me look around the apartment some more and then we’ll check, okay?”

“Okay.”

It wasn’t a big apartment, so looking around didn’t take too long. There wasn’t much else to important. The guy kept most of his shit in boxes. He slept in a mattress on the floor—unmade, like Matt said. The amount of shit _in_ the boxes seemed a bit light to Jessica, but seeing how the guy couldn’t even afford a bed frame, it could’ve just been another part of his poor person minimalist thing. She did eventually find the pot, hidden pretty cleverly in the back corner of the closet under a loose floorboard. She put it, the pipe, and the wad of cash that were all crammed in a box together back where she found it. Like she’d told Matt—not their problem. Speaking of Matt, he didn’t find much else either besides the fact that there was a knife in one of the coffee table boxes (fruit knife, he’d heard it rattling when his cane accidentally bumped into one of the boxes, nothing crazy but Jessica had left it where it was) and another stash of weed in the cabinet above the fridge. He also noted that one of the empty ziplock baggies in the trash can _smells like my meds._ “Not exactly like them,” he added as Jessica tossed the bag back, “but close.”

“It’s probably oxy or adderall or something. You keep your shit locked up, right?”

“…should I?”

“Depends on what you’re on. Just don’t advertise you’re on medication. Some people will take anything to get a high.”

 _Okay. What do I know about this guy?_ Broke. Smoked pot, either used or dealt pills of some sort. A junkie who’d fallen through the cracks. Wasn’t unusual. There wasn’t much in the way of forms or flyers, but the business card did give her one potential lead. _Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he did get help._ She hoped he did, but there was only one way to know for sure. Jessica tried calling the number as she and Matt left the apartment and climbed the fire escape to get to the roof. “Did you notice if it smelled like…” She couldn’t resist grinning at the back of Matt’s head. “ _Intimate interactions_ in there?”

“ _Hilarious_ ,” Matt said dryly. “It didn’t, no. Think he gets night sweats, but that didn’t seem relevant.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t really help me.” Someone answered. Time to improvise. Jessica put on her best _haven’t slept in a week_ voice: “Uh, hi, is this the number for Doctor…Falter? Faulkner? My name is Jennifer. Jennifer Margolis. A friend of mine…a friend passed your name along, said you might be able to help me. Tommy Quinn?”

Doctor Faulkner (and it was a miracle Jessica had been able to make _that_ out—what was it with doctors and shit handwriting?) responded, “Oh, good. Are you looking for psychiatric help or rehab?”

“Bit of both, I guess. It’s just gotten really bad, and…” Matt held out a hand to her at the top of the fire escape to give her a hand up. She didn’t have to take it, but she did. “I just, I don’t want to be like this anymore. You know?”

“Of course, Miss Margolis. I understand completely. If you don’t mind my asking, when exactly did Tommy recommend you to me?”

 _Interesting_. “While back. I don’t know exactly, I’m not really clear on…days, anymore, you get me? But it was a while. I should’ve called you sooner…”

“No, no, don’t worry about it. I only ask because I haven’t heard from him in a while. I was hoping you might have.”

 _Okay. That’s weird._ Jessica played stupid, though she kept going over that bit of information in her head as she went through the paces of setting up a consultation. It might be good to go, ask a few questions, either in character or out of character. _The place did feel pretty abandoned…where the fuck did you_ go _, Tommy?_

Jessica glanced at the water tanks. She thought about what Matt had said, about how the water smelled like a morgue. She suddenly had a very, very bad feeling about this situation.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be there. Thank you so much, Doctor Faulkner.” Jessica hung up as quickly as she could without it seeming suspicious. Matt was standing nearby. His face was blank. “Did you hear that?” He nodded. “Are you _sure_ …”

“I’m…” Matt licked his lips. “I haven’t been around… _that_ many dead bodies, but…”

Fuck.

“I’m gonna take a look.” Jessica shoved her phone in her pocket and walked to the water tank. “You might want to stay back.” If he was right about this, it was going to smell something awful. Jessica climbed up easily, opened the latch at the top of the tank even easier. She hadn’t wanted to believe that it was true—even with all the evidence pointing to _something bad_ , part of her that she usually tried to keep quiet kept hoping that there would be a different outcome to this.

The smell that slapped her in the face when she opened the latch killed that hope as quickly as it killed her appetite.

“ _Ugh_ …”

Jessica looked away, one hand covering her mouth and nose. As she did, she caught a glimpse of Matt. He had gone pale and still almost immediately. He didn’t stay still for long—in the time it took her to glance back into the tank to confirm that, yes, she _was_ looking at a dead body right now, Matt had run to the corner furthest from the tank and started gagging. She shut it as an act of mercy to both of them.

Jessica hadn’t been able to get a good look at the body. Whoever they were, they were floating face-down. She’d seen dark hair and dark clothes, but that didn’t tell her much. Tommy Quinn had dark hair, but so did she. So did Matt. She couldn’t be sure it was him, but she also was not keen on finding out on her own. Jessica climbed down from the water tank and walked to Matt. He had walked away from the corner, and she quickly realized why. The gagging hadn’t just been dry heaves. He still looked pale and sick, but she thought she detected a bit of anger in his voice when he spoke. “We should…we should call the police.”

Jessica couldn’t argue with that. This was officially way more trouble than she was looking for. Better to just get the cops involved now, of her own volition, than have the whole thing go south on her when she was least expecting it.

Jessica recognized the officer who showed up along with a handful of cops and some CSI guys. He was the guy who’d let her out of the cell when Kilgrave had taken over the station. He was in a suit and tie, not the uniform, so he’d gotten promoted since their little run-in. And he seemed to know Matt. “Why is it that whenever something happens, you find a way to get involved?” asked the detective, his voice weary. “Don’t you ever get tired of being in the middle of shit?”

“Keeps life fresh,” Matt said. His attempt at sounding upbeat failed terribly. He still looked green. “Good to see you too, Brett.”

“I’m sure.” “Brett” looked at Jessica. She thought she saw a spark of familiarity in his eyes. He didn’t comment on it, but it made him look even wearier than it was before. “You two want to explain to me what happened?”

 _Great._ This was always the fun part. “I got hired by Tommy Quinn’s brother to hunt him down. Brother gave me the key to his apartment, but it was the wrong key, so I went in through the window. He saw…”

“I volunteered,” Matt admitted. He looked like he was about to say something else, but he quickly shut up and covered his mouth and nose again. They must’ve opened the tank back up.

“He wanted to make sure I didn’t get into any deep shit, so he came along. There was something off about the water, so we came up here and…” She pointed towards the roof. “I told your dispatch guy the rest. I can get my client, he’ll verify what I just told you.”

“Uh-huh.” Brett pulled out a notepad and started writing things down. “You find anything interesting in that apartment?”

“Drugs and evidence of drugs,” Matt said before Jessica could reply. She shot him an annoyed glare; he, not seeing it for obvious reasons, kept going. “It didn’t seem like he’d been there for a while and Jessica found contact information for a…doctor?” It sounded like he was afraid to stop talking—like he’d start hurling if he focused too long on what they’d found. “Right?”

Jessica rolled her eyes and handed over the business card. “I called. She said she hadn’t talked to him in a while. I didn’t get anything else out of her.” Partially because she’d been using a fake identity but the cops didn’t need to know about that. “You’re going to find our fingerprints in the apartment.”

“Then we’re going to need elimination prints from both of you. Did you touch or disturb the body in any way?”

“I couldn’t _reach_ the body,” Jessica pointed out. “And we put everything back where we found it in the apartment. Look, can you at least tell me if the body belongs to Tommy Quinn or not? His brother’s paying me for answers.”

“How about this: you get me the brother’s contact information and everything you had on the case, and I’ll have him come down to ID the body.”

Great. Fan-fucking-tastic. Jessica hated handing over files, and was tempted to say _no_. But that would only make her look bad, and she was starting to get the impression that she _wouldn’t_ be on the hook for this. _Take what you can get, Jones._ “Fine. I’ll grab everything.”

_Foggy. Foggy. Foggy._

She looked at Matt. A new look of dread passed his face, one unrelated to the body they’d found in that tank. “Shit…can I…?”

“Just don’t go far,” Brett said.

“Thanks, Brett.” Matt pulled his phone out of his pocket and swiped at the screen. “Hey, I can explain…”

He stepped away to talk to Foggy. Jessica tried really hard _not_ to listen to the conversation as she glanced up at the roof. “This shit heap just keeps getting worse and worse, huh?”

Brett snorted. “It’s kind of sick that this feels normal for me. At least there’s not some nut job with a bone to pick shooting up the Kitchen.” He shot her a quizzical look. “Where were you during that, anyway?”

She’d been asked that more times than she liked. As though there was anything she could’ve done about the gun-toting maniac. “Minding my own goddamn business, that’s where,” Jessica said bluntly. “I’m a PI, not Iron Man. I don’t get paid to deal with that shit.”

To her surprise, Brett laughed. “Smart move.” His gaze shifted over her shoulder. Matt was coming back, that pensive look back on his face. “Everything okay?”

Matt addressed his phone: “Hang on, I’m gonna put you on speaker.” He swiped at the phone some more before holding it out. “Say hi, Brett. Jessica.”

Jessica glanced at Matt. She stood corrected. He wasn’t pensive, he was _pissed_. “Look, I don’t know what he’s told you, but it’s probably not bullshit,” she said instead of _hi_. “Blame the cops.”

“Hey, Foggy,” Brett said, glancing between the phone and Matt with a baffled look on his face. “We just need to get some prints and a statement. I’ll try not to keep him too long.”

Jessica heard a tinny voice—a quiet _oh_ that she almost missed over the sounds of the city—but whatever Foggy was about to say next was cut off by Matt abruptly jerking the phone back and turning off speaker with a few more deft movements. He didn’t walk away fast enough for her to not-hear the first part of what was said. “I get it, okay, I had a problem, but I found a goddamn body today…”

Jessica glanced back at Brett. He actually looked worried, just for a second, but hid it under a veneer of professionalism. “We’ll need a statement and prints from you, too. And that contact information.”

_This is gonna be a long fucking afternoon, isn’t it?_

Matt joined them at the station. He was quiet the drive there, but she could feel the frustration rolling off of him. That was the only thing that kept her from getting on his case about revealing all their cards without her say-so. Not that she was against them complying—though it helped that the police proceedings that followed were the calmest she’d had in her career, straightforward exchange of information and some fingerprinting then she could go—but it was _her_ case. _She_ made that call. And they’d definitely have to have a talk about that later, but Jessica decided it could wait until Matt looked less like a bomb about to go off. She’d planned on catching him before they left the station, but he’d wrapped things up more quickly than she had and was gone by the time she was ready to leave.

Jessica spent the rest of the day thinking about calling or texting. She didn’t. She _did_ , on a hunch, swing by the bar Matt had mentioned the night he showed up with black eyed Foggy and a sprained finger. Josie’s. Just like with the body, she was really hoping she wouldn’t find him there. Just like with the body, she was disappointed. He saw him at the bar when she glanced in the window.

 _Fuck_. That conversation about her cases was definitely going to have to wait.

Jessica hesitated at the door for a good minute before going inside. Bars weren’t really Jessica’s thing, so she’d never been in the place before.  It was a pretty standard dive bar. Grisly looking sorts. Pool table in the back. The woman behind the bar (probably Josie) looked like she would toss someone out through the window for starting shit. Matt wasn’t at the bar anymore; he’d found a table in the back to sit at. He was out of his suit, instead wearing a faded sweatshirt and jeans. There was a glass of something in front of him—she couldn’t tell what in the lighting. “I thought you weren’t supposed to drink when you were on shit,” she said as she sat down at his table.

Matt didn’t seem surprised by her appearance, but he’d probably heard her come in. “Probably not. I told Josie I could only have one, so…” He shrugged and took a sip from the glass. She saw him grimace for a second, but whatever it was, he pushed through the burn to have another sip. “Sorry.”

“For what?”

“Telling Brett everything. I should’ve let you do it. It’s your case.” His fingers drummed against the side of the glass as he spoke. “Lawyer instinct, I guess. Know when to cooperate, know when to shut your damn mouth…” He laughed bitterly. “I’m not really good at that last one.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” _Well, shit._ That solved the problem of how to bring up the topic. “You’re right. You should’ve let me handle it.”

“I know.”

“And if you do it again, I’ll kick your ass.”

“I know.”

“ _And_ you’ll kiss any future team-ups goodbye.”

“That’s fair,” Matt said. She thought she saw his eyebrow twitch but whatever he was thinking, he didn’t voice it aloud. Probably something about how she’d just used the word _team-up_ to describe what they’d done. _Shit_ she hadn’t meant to do that. _Focus, Jones._ “I’m really sorry.”

Jessica waved him off. She didn’t doubt the sincerity of his apology, but she didn’t want him self-flagellating all over her tonight. It wasn’t going to help the situation, though he probably knew that and just couldn’t help himself. Anxiety and bipolar—that’s what he’d told her. It explained a lot, _especially_ the apologizing. “Just don’t do it again. I’m giving you another chance because you’re useful, Murdock. Don’t fuck it up.” The bitch act worked once again; Jessica saw Matt smile, just for a second. Then her mouth kept going and ruined it: “Did, uh, did you and Foggy talk?”

Again, Jessica didn’t doubt the sincerity of Matt’s apology. But she also had a feeling his behavior didn’t _just_ have to do with her. Her gut had been right, because Matt’s face fell immediately when she mentioned Foggy. “Uh…” He took another long sip from the glass. “Not so much… _talk_. I couldn’t…have the conversation when I got back and then we were busy and at the end of the day I apologized for snapping and he apologized for…” He trailed off. Took another sip. “I hate this.”

“Hate what?”

“This. All of it. I hate that one of the people I care about most in the world doubts me. I hate myself for giving him every reason to. I hate myself for getting mad even when I know he has precedence. I hate that we found a body in water tank. I hate that I can’t get the thought out of my head that whoever that was had…a family, and friends, and maybe they were trying to get help for everything...and even if they weren’t, that was a _person_ , and we found them, and…” He stopped to take another drink. “And I hate that there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it.”

Jessica raised an eyebrow. “Who are you and what have you done with Matt Murdock?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“ _Not a goddamn thing I can do about it_. There’s plenty you can do about it.”

“Jessica, it’s…” Matt put the glass down and rubbed his eyes. “I know it…doesn’t seem like it all the time. But you know I do respect the legal system, right?”

He was right. It didn’t seem that way all the time. Or, from where she was standing, _ever_ , but now she was curious to hear his explanation. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“What I…” Matt lowered his voice and leaned a bit closer. “What I do, it’s not…one size fits all. I respect the legal system, yes, but with that respect comes the understanding that it’s broken. It’s very broken, and that’s what I do. I balance the scales. Help the cases the law can’t, or won’t. That’s what…” He didn’t say the word directly, but she knew what he meant. “That’s what I’m… _trying_ to do.” He sighed slightly and leaned back. “And anyway, I need to get less involved. The more I put on my plate, the more stressed I get, and when I get stressed, I explode, and take out everyone in the immediate area with me.” He went back to holding the glass in one hand, but didn’t drink anything. “You saw. You know.”

She didn’t, not really, but she had an idea. It kind of reminded her of herself, if she was being honest. After Kilgrave…yeah, she hadn’t been in a great place. She was out now, as much as anyone _could_ be after shit like that. Matt was getting out, too, but progress was slow. She knew that, too.

“Anyway, point is, the police have this under control, and unless the Hand is involved or they stage a cover-up…no reason for me to start swinging.” He didn’t sound convinced. He wasn’t even trying to hide how unconvinced he was. “Or that’s what I keep telling myself to keep from doing something stupid. I can’t fix everything in the world, right?”

He said it like he wanted to. Just like with the apology, she had no doubts about the sincerity in his desire to find whoever had killed that guy and bring them to justice. She heard a spark in his voice that she’d only caught glimpses of during their team-up with Luke and Danny; that _we have to do something_ mentality that had made him the first one to really _agree_ with Danny that they should work together. It kind of reminded her of Trish.

It wasn’t a bad thing. Or at least it wasn’t now, when Matt was nursing a drink instead of diving head-first into something stupid. She could see how it would go either way.

“You want the rest of this?” Matt asked abruptly. “If I finish it, I might start getting maudlin, and I don’t think you want to hear that.”

“God, no, no one wants to hear that.” Jessica took the offered glass and downed what was left in one go. It was something harder, not whiskey, but… “What is this?”

“Scotch.”

“Seriously?”

Matt laughed. “Yeah, seriously. My dad used to drink it. He-”

_Foggy. Foggy. Foggy._

Fucking hell, that sound was like a warning for the incoming apocalypse. Matt’s face went quiet and closed-off again. “You know you don’t have to answer, right?” Jessica said, despite knowing that was terrible advice.

“I do have to answer it,” Matt said. He didn’t look happy about it as he did. From where Jessica was sitting, he seemed less angry at Foggy and more like he was dreading the conversation. Based on what he’d told her, he had a lot of reasons to. “Hey. Yeah, I’m at Josie’s…” Matt started shaking his head immediately. “I had half a drink, Foggy, it’s fine.”

Since Matt couldn’t see her _that’s some fresh bullshit, Murdock_ eyebrow raise, Jessica tried for a _that’s some fresh bullshit, Murdock_ glass flick, sliding it across the table towards Matt’s arm. He caught it before it made impact. “No, man, it’s…listen, can we talk? I mean, really talk? I know I left in a hurry and I’m sorry, but I do want to talk.” He fiddled with the glass as he listened to Foggy’s response; after a few seconds, the anxiety on his face gave way to a smile of relief. “Okay. Okay, yeah, I’ll be there in five. See you then.” He hung up and immediately rested his forehead on the table. “ _Christ_.”

“That sounded like it went well,” Jessica noted.

“I know, I’m shocked, too.” Matt was still smiling when he lifted his head. “I should go. I said I’d be over there in a few.” He started pulling his wallet out of his pocket as he turned to leave, but stopped. “Hey, Jessica?”

“If you’re going to apologize again…”

Matt ducked his head, a quiet laugh escaping his lips. From the slight blush that spread on his face, he probably _had_ been about to apologize. But he didn’t. Instead: “Thanks, Jessica.”

She didn’t know what the fuck he was thanking her for, but she shrugged it off. “You’re welcome, I guess. Go talk to Foggy. I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah, see you.”

She watched him pay at the bar and walk away. She stayed at the table for a while. Her mouth still tasted like scotch. She wanted to blame the scotch for that feeling in her gut, but she knew that was bullshit.

 _Shit_.

 

_Eight:_

Next time she saw Matt, he seemed much happier. The conversation must’ve gone well with Foggy. He didn’t talk about it again when he saw her—and he _did_ see her again. He showed up at her place a few days later to ask if she’d heard anything about the body they’d found. She hadn’t. That didn’t surprise her. The cops weren’t really up to sharing information with the alcoholic PI who’d made their life a whole lot harder by finding a body in a water tank of some shitty low-income apartment building. She knew that the body wasn’t the guy she’d been looking for, which was great for his brother, but less so for whatever poor bastard had ended up in the water tank. She also heard they had to evac the building while they got the dead body water flushed out.

“I hope they got it all,” Matt said as he leaned against the door frame. He seemed hesitant to sit down, but then again, he did only have a few minutes. Lunch break and all. “I showered three times after I got home. I still didn’t feel clean.”

“You’re telling me.” Jessica had actually bought bottled water to drink until she could double-check the water tank in her building. The thing had looked slightly sketchy, but free of any dead bodies. She’d take it. “They haven’t contacted you, either?”

Matt shook his head. “They probably got everything they needed from us from the statements. Anyway, what are they going to do? Ask me to identify someone in a lineup? Even if we had run into the guy who did it…” Matt immediately looked guilty, though there was still a bit of a smile on his face. “I probably shouldn’t be cracking jokes when someone’s died.”

“Nah, do what you gotta do.” Jessica’s phone buzzed; she flipped it over, expecting to see it bitching at her because of low battery, but instead saw a text. She skimmed its contents and sighed heavily. “Motherfucker.”

“What?”

“You know Turk Barrett?”

Matt’s eyebrows shot up. “I mean, Daredevil’s beaten him up a few times, if that’s what you mean. He’s an asshole.”

“An asshole who’s shit at paying child support. His ex has basically got me on retainer to rough him up if he doesn’t pay on time. He’s late again, so I guess I have to hunt him down. You wouldn’t happen to know where he’s been lately, would you?”

“Not lately. I think I scared him off from selling guns in his usual areas. Want some help finding him? It’s been a while since I put the fear of God in him. Well…” He smiled slightly. “Fear of the devil more like.”

Jessica rolled her eyes. “Sure. Hopefully no dead bodies this time, right?”

“Shh, don’t _jinx_ it.” Matt’s fingers moved to his wrist watch. “You going to head out right now?”

“Nah, it can wait. When are you done?”

“Six, about. Meet you back here?”

“Sure. You doing this as Daredevil or Matt?”

He thought about it for a second. “Let’s go with Matt,” he said finally. “I can distract him and you can approach from behind. He’ll just start running if he sees you _and_ Daredevil.”

Fair point.

Matt showed up at 6:30 with his phone glued to his ear. “No, no, I’ll grab it tomorrow morning. No, I won’t sleep in this time, I promise. Hey, I’ve gotta go. I’ll talk to you later, okay? Bye.” He slipped his phone in his pocket. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah, just…” Jessica tapped out a reply onto her phone with one hand and grabbed her jacket with the other. “Trish is trying to get me to go to some function with her. I guess a new restaurant is opening up and her bosses want her to check it out for Trish Talk.”

Matt perked up. “That sounds fun. Why the voice?”

“Because it sounds like some kind of puffed up experimental place where they sell you bite-sized courses for roughly the same amount as my _rent_.”

“ _Ahh_. Rich people shit.”

“ _Exactly._ ” She shoved her phone in her pocket and pulled her jacket on. “They never want to investigate burger places for these things. And when they do, it’s fucking vegan burgers or some shit.”

Matt’s nose wrinkled in a grimace. Jessica nearly burst out laughing at the expression. He looked like a toddler who was trying to be talked into eating broccoli. “ _Ugh_.”

“Yeah, me too.” Jessica walked out the door, Matt on her heels. “It’s fucking bean mash that doesn’t deserve to be called a burger.”

“And the texture is off. I don’t know if it’s inherent to the burger or if it’s because I was expecting burger texture and instead got… _that_. But it’s _off_.”

She guessed that made sense for Matt to notice. If his sense of touch was as sensitive as his sense of smell, it’d probably be that way everywhere—not just his hands. Still, it was weird to think about. “Glad we can agree on the important things,” she said, “like burgers. You cool with taking the stairs?”

“I prefer it.”

They hit the streets, starting with the places Turk usually went. Most of them were abandoned. One had a few people hanging out—just some stoners, not Turk’s usual crowd. Still, Jessica and Matt stopped to ask them if they knew where Turk was. They didn’t, not personally, but one guy was pretty sure a friend of his got weed from the same dealer Turk did. They hunted down the dealer. After a bit of glaring, and reassurances that they were just there to make the guy pay up, the guy told them that Turk was stopping by later that night.

They only had to wait half an hour.

Turk’s car was a lot nicer than Jessica expected. Business must’ve been good in the arms dealing business. She nudged Matt when she saw Turk, though she probably didn’t need to. Turk was on the phone with someone. Matt knew the guy’s voice already; he was probably getting ready to move the second the car pulled up. “Go. Just keep him distracted, I’ll circle around.”

Matt nodded and stepped out of the alley. Jessica risked glancing out of the alley to see Matt walking down the street, right for Turk.

Right _into_ Turk, which she took as her cue to get moving.

“Jesus, man watch where you’re going!” Turk yelped.

“Sorry…!”

Jessica didn’t have as good hearing as Matt, but she could hear their conversation as she climbed up the fire escape and onto the roof. “...hell is a guy like you doing out?”

“Oh you know, just breathing in that fresh city air…do I know you?”

“Wh-nah, man…think I know you, though. Weren’t you on TV?”

Jessica could practically hear the cringe in Matt’s voice when he replied. “Uh…yeah, it’s, uh, it’s possible.”

“Frank Castle.”

“Yup, yup that was me.”

She crossed the roof and jumped to the other one, freezing when she landed, just to be sure Turk hadn’t heard her landing. She could jump further than Matt, but her landings weren’t always as graceful. The conversation below kept going as though nothing had happened: “Tough break. You still in practice?”

“Yeah, getting back into it.” Oh, _god_ admitting that to Turk must have hurt Matt. He must’ve known the question that was coming next; Jessica could hear how forced his smile was getting. “Why? You know someone who needs a lawyer?”

“Man, who-”

Again. Jessica’s landings were not as graceful as Matt’s or Danny’s. And unfortunately, Turk _heard_ her jump from the roof down into the alley. “The fuck…?” she heard him mutter.

Matt cut in quickly. “I mean, I’m pretty picky with my clientele, I won’t lie. Some people are just…good at causing trouble. If you know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” Turk sounded nervous. “Hey, listen, I gotta go. You be careful out there, okay?”

_Shit._

Jessica started speed-walking out of the alley. Fortunately, Turk had only gotten in his car by the time she got out; Matt was leaning against it, looking like he was trying to keep the conversation going. “I mean, look, if you have a friend in trouble or something, I can at least consult…”

Turk’s car started up. It didn’t get far; Jessica reached the side of it and lifted it up by the nose with ease, making the tires squeal as they found purchase on nothing. Front wheel drive, _bad_ luck for him. “Hey, asshole, remember me?” Jessica asked cheerfully.

From the look on Turk’s face as he leaned out the window, he did remember. “The _fuck_ … _?!_ ”

“It’s child support time. If you don’t want me hunting you down, you should just pay up on time.”

Turk looked from Jessica to Matt and Matt’s shit-eating grin and put two and two together. The look of betrayal on his face was almost comical. “Are you seriously shaking me down right now?”

“Yes, I’m seriously shaking you down. And here’s how this is gonna work. You either pay up by tomorrow, _or_ I bring a world of hurt down on your ass with one phone call. I’m sure the police will be happy to know the many, _many_ ways you’ve been breaking parole lately.” Jessica looked off just past Turk, feigning contemplation. “Alternately, if you don’t pay up, I could fry your insides with my laser eyes. Not all the way, just enough that it hurts.”

And what do you know, Turk actually bought that shit. “…are you fucking with me?”

“Do I look like I’m fucking with you? Hey…” Jessica snapped her fingers in Turk’s face when he looked towards Matt again. “Don’t look at him. He’s not going to help you.”

“C’mon, man! She just threatened me! Aren’t you a lawyer or something?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Matt said, somehow keeping a straight face despite the laughter bubbling in his voice. “I don’t see shit right now.”

The utterly baffled and terrified look on Turk’s face made the joke all the better. “Twenty-four hours, Turk,” Jessica said, “or laser eyes. You got it?”

She didn’t wait for him to reply before releasing his car. He was gone with a screeching of tires. When the sound of his motor revving died down, Jessica heard a new sound—Matt, laughing _hysterically_. “Your _laser eyes?!_ ” he said.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t believe how often people buy that.” Matt bounced in place— _actually_ bounced—and laughed again. She’d never seen him _bounce_ before. God, what a _nerd_. “What about you, Mr. _I don’t see shit right now_?”

“Trust me, there’s more where that came from.” Matt shook his head as they started walking again. “He walked right into it. _Laser eyes_. God.”

It wasn’t that funny, and she was going to tell him that. When she looked his way again, though, the words died in her throat. They were just walking under a street light, so she got a good look at him. He was still smiling. Still laughing at her stupid lie.

_What the fuck…?_

“Oh, man, what time is it?”

“It’s…” Jessica pulled out her phone and checked. “Pushing midnight. Why, you got somewhere to be?”

“No, just have to be up early tomorrow. I should go. That was fun. We should do that again.”

“You think threatening guys so they’ll pay back child support is fun?”

“I do when it’s with you.” The comment made the strange feeling in her gut stronger. What the _fuck?!_ “I’ll see you later, right?”

“…I mean, you _won’t_ , but…”

And there he went laughing again. “ _Shit_. My own tactics against me.” Matt bumped her gently with his elbow. “ _Brutal_. Goodnight, Jess.”

“Goodnight, Matt.”

Jessica watched him walk down the street until he disappeared into the darkness. She thought about that glimpse of his face she’d gotten as she started walking in the opposite direction. She wished she’d gotten a picture. It was easier to pick through moments like that when she could print them out and _really_ look at them. She _could’ve_ gotten a picture, but that would’ve been weird.

She pretended the memory was a picture. She got a freeze frame of his face in her head, sharpened it, clarified it. She mulled it over the walk back to her apartment, up the stairs, through her broken door. She thought about it as she sat down at her desk and reached into her desk drawer for the bottle she knew was there. From where she’d been standing, she’d been able to see the wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled. He’d looked happy. He’d looked… _shit_ , he’d looked really happy

She liked seeing him happy. She liked seeing him smiling. Not just because they were friends or anything (side note, when the _fuck_ had that happened?). She liked seeing him happy because…

Because…

_Oh my god._

_Oh my god. I’m in love with Matt Murdock._

She slammed the bottle down onto the desk. “ _Fucker!_ ” she yelled at her empty apartment.

That goddamn smiley-faced _fucker_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, [I made a really dumb meme that sums up this first chapter](http://thatlastpartsthecatholicism.tumblr.com/post/163883281674/so-i-wrote-this-fanfic-and-im-really-happy). It was all I could think of while I was writing it.


	2. Side B

 

_One:_

Jessica Jones was a prickly, hard-drinking woman who probably had more than her fair share of shit going on in her life.

Matt liked her.

He hadn’t liked her at first, possibly because he’d found her cynicism grating when he was so wrapped up in his pain that it drowned out everything else, including the hurt of other people. It didn’t help that she hadn’t seemed _especially_ fond of him, either. In fairness to her, Matt knew he was a handful in those early days. The depression spirals did that.

Things had changed when she found him trying to dig up Elektra’s grave during a rainstorm. She’d actually _helped_ him look, to confirm what his mind already knew but what he couldn’t accept due to paranoia or some kind of psychosis brought on by weeks of not taking care of himself. She’d been the only one to understand why he wanted to look. Matt wondered about that, sometimes, but kept his questions to himself.

The list of things he knew about her wasn’t very long, but he was slowly expanding it the more they hung out. He knew she liked whiskey—a lot, from the way the smell of it always seemed to cling to her. He knew she smoked, but only sometimes—the smell still lingered, but not as strongly as it did with regular smokers. He knew her sleep schedule was as screwed as his used to be (okay, as his still was—he was working on it, but it was still kind of a mess some nights). He knew that she followed her clients around before taking their cases.

He knew that, underneath all that bristle and alcoholism, she was a good person, with a good heart. But he wouldn’t say that to her face, because she was _very_ defensive of that fact. Hide your weak points. Don’t let them get to you. He got that. He really did.

Sometimes Matt wished his weak points were easier to hide, but they weren’t. They never were.

For example: he was probably seeing her a lot more than was strictly necessary for two people who were friendly but not… _close_. At least, he didn’t think they were. Jessica was simultaneously easy and difficult to get a read on. Easy because, if she didn’t like something, she’d let you know immediately. Difficult because, beyond that, gauging any level of fondness on her part was hard. She had never protested talking to him, or him tagging long on two of her cases now. She’d even let him dump all the shit about therapy on her (which he appreciated more and more with every passing day). But he wasn’t sure to what extent that made them actual _friends_.

He considered her a friend; otherwise, he wouldn’t have told her all that shit about himself. But did she consider _him_ a friend?

“Have you thought about asking her?” Julianne asked.

Doctor Julianne Burke was, honestly, a great person, and Matt was very glad to have met her. She’d done more to help him untangle his fucked up emotional state than Matt had managed on his own in twenty years. But sometimes he _really_ hated how she could pluck out the obvious and present it to him. Mostly because it made him feel like an idiot.

“You mean in a _check yes if you like me_ kind of way?” Matt asked dryly. He heard her seat creak as she leaned back into it. He’d imagine that she was giving him an unimpressed look, but she didn’t strike him as being the sort to give unimpressed looks. She empathetic in a very neutral way—neutral voice, neutral heartbeat, calm and collected even when he felt on the verge of a panic attack. Her calm was soothing. It made the room feel safe. “I don’t know. I guess I’m scared to find out the answer. I don’t want to think I told her all that shit about me when she didn’t… _care_ , you know?” His stomach twisted anxiously. “I’ve already been there once.”

A bit of that empathy entered her voice: “Not everyone is like your tutor. What ulterior motives could she possibly have?”

_Tutor._ Code word for _Stick._ Re-framing the man as an abusive teacher while leaving out the parts about him training Matt to fight in a war against a ninja death cult was more difficult than he’d thought it’d be. That was the price he paid for trying to get better while also holding on to some of his secrets, Matt guessed. “None,” Matt said finally. “Or…nothing I can think of.”

“There you go. If she was listening, it’s because she does care about your problems. You said it yourself, she would have told you if she wasn’t comfortable with it.”

Again: he hated how she could pluck out the obvious and present it to him. But he was also completely grateful for it. Catastrophic Thinking was his middle name. It made him forget that there was a reason people invoked Occam’s razor. _The simplest solution is the most likely._

Unless your name is Matt Murdock and you think everything is going to crash and burn. In his defense, there wasn’t much in his life to refute that idea.

Things had been better lately, though. They really had. Things were still bumpy with Foggy sometimes. For all the olive branches had had extended to Matt, there was still that overhanging feeling that Foggy was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not that Matt could blame him for that; _he_ was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. That was how it went, right? The mania faded, the consequences of his actions caught up to him finally, everything fell apart in his hands. Cue the panic and the depression spirals.

Again. Catastrophic thinking.

He tried to deter that kind of thinking by remembering the things that _hadn’t_ gone wrong. Danny still liked him. So did Luke. And Jessica was still letting him in whenever he stopped by her place. Mostly because half the time, he couldn’t get the door open.

“It’s not locked,” she called one day when she heard Matt rattling at the doorknob.

“Yeah, I figured, but I can’t…” He tried putting his shoulder into it. It budged a _little_ , but not enough for him to actually get _in_. “…uh, it’s stuck.” _Big bad Daredevil, foiled by a door. The tabloids would love to hear about that one._

After a pause, the door made a terrible scraping sound and opened. “Thanks for reminding me. I need to call the repair guys.”

“Yeah, I’d do that. Do I want to know?”

“It’s a long story.” Jessica walked back to her desk. Matt didn’t even bother trying to get the door closed as he followed her inside. He was starting to learn how to identify a lost cause, and that door was _definitely_ a lost cause. “The cops still aren’t telling me anything else about the dead guy, if you’re wondering.”

“I figured. I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

Matt had always been the kind of person to code his emotions. This was a good example: _I wanted to see how you were doing_ here translated to _I’m testing the boundaries of this relationship a bit, just to see how friendly we are._ The problem was that not everyone _spoke_ his particular variation of _emotionally stunted and weird_. A lot of what he did or said could be misinterpreted. But he did it anyway, because the alternative right now was that he asked her straight out.

_Julianne said I should ask her. She didn’t say **how** I had to ask her._ Weak excuse, but he was sticking to it.

Jessica didn’t answer at first. The silence made his heart skip a beat. “I mean, it’s not like I have to deal with fucking aliens or…necromancy ninjas.” Matt snorted. “So I’m fine. You want water or something?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

His heart rate settled down. He couldn’t know for sure, but maybe she’d recognized what he was really trying to say. Maybe she understood what he wanted—to know if they were friends.

Maybe she was saying _yes_ , without really saying it.

He couldn’t know for sure. But even the possibility was enough to soothe his anxiety. The fact that she didn’t immediately throw him out or get defensive about him wanting to see how she was doing all spoke to the fact that she did want him around. Or didn’t mind having him around.

After everything he’d been through lately, he would take _not minding having him around._

“They really haven’t told you anything about the case?”

“Hell no. They’re not telling and I’m not interested.” Matt heard a drawer in Jessica’s desk rattle open. “I dodged a bullet with that one. The only good news is that Tommy Quinn wasn’t involved. I guess he ran off with someone? Point is, I got paid for that job and his brother is getting him help. Happy ending there.” Something glass was placed on her desk. “I’m surprised they haven’t told you anything, seeing how you and that detective are buddies.”

“We’re not…” Matt shook his head. “Brett is Foggy’s friend, really. Not mine. Foggy knows everyone, I’m just his weird loner friend.”

Jessica snorted noisily. Whatever was in the bottle smelled harsh and strong. It was the same scent that always seemed to cling to her. “If you’re his weird loner friend, what’s with the _Mr. Charming_ act? Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

Of course she’d noticed. “I don’t necessarily want people _realizing_ I’m the weird loner friend. It doesn’t do good things for my standing as a lawyer. Or a person. People have all these expectations, you know…” He’d mentioned this to her before, hadn’t he? In the Laundromat, back when they saw each other there. Matt kind of missed it. He’d been doing his laundry during the day, in an attempt to reclaim some sleeping hours, but it wasn’t the same. Jessica wasn’t there, for starters. “…what with me being inspirationally disabled and a summa cum laude law school graduate.”

“What the _fuck_ does ‘inspirationally disabled’ mean?”

“You know…like in those inspiration porn movies where the disabled character is _so brave_ because they were able to beat the odds and do something that disabled people shouldn’t be able to do. There are a million Hallmark movies about that kind of thing. Usually someone gives an inspirational speech?” Matt stopped to think. He didn’t see many movies, but there were some he knew by reputation. “ _Forrest Gump?”_

“Oh, fucking _gross_.”

“Yeah, and people think that kind of thing applies in real life. I’m either a pity case or a credit to my disability, no middle ground. So I can’t be a fuckup if I want people to take me seriously. You know, I sometimes worry I only got my summa because the school wanted to look good?” Damn, had he told anyone besides Foggy that? He didn’t think he had. “I’ve checked my transcripts…ten times since I graduated. Annually. On average.”

“Do you really think they’d do that?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them. People are weird about the blindness. Actually, I think...I think you and Luke and Danny are the only ones who haven’t been weird about it.”

Jessica’s chair creaked as she shifted. He heard liquid sloshing as she took a sip from the bottle. “I was a little weird about it,” she corrected.

“You were an asshole to me. Most people would treat me like I’m made of china.”

“So, you’re saying you liked me cussing you out?”

“I didn’t hate it.”

“You’re welcome, then.”

Matt laughed. _Only you, Jessica. Only you._

 

_Two:_

He didn’t always sleep.

He wanted to. He honestly did. Matt felt like he was finally working out the balance of work, Daredevil, and taking care of his probably already failing body. But some nights he would lay in bed, eyes wide open and staring into nothing, his perception painting a chaotic picture of cars, the people three blocks down having a loudass party, someone’s _fucking_ dog…

Matt rolled over and pulled his pillow over his head. His dad used to sleep like that. Matt didn’t know how he did it, because it didn’t take long for him to feel too hot, too smothered. He threw the pillow; it collided with the doorframe. “ _Shit_ ,” he muttered as he sat up.

_Okay. Plan B._

The streets were quiet that night, or as quiet as they could be on a night like this. He could go out there, just to be sure…but there was also a lot of laundry piling up…

_Do the Avengers have to make these decisions? Laundry or punching?_ Matt huffed to himself as he got out of bed. _Or do they have people who do their laundry for them? I bet Tony Stark has other people do his laundry._

But Matt wasn’t Tony Stark. He was just a guy. A guy who was going to be too damn busy to do his laundry during the day for the next few days. “I could do both,” he muttered to himself. Then, after a pause, “Sure, why not?”

He hadn’t worn the old outfit in a long time. Claire would probably have a fit if she knew; a compression shirt and a cloth mask offered him all the protection of a wet tissue. But it was kind of nice. Reminded him of simpler times. Well, not exactly _simpler_. Things were just as complicated. He had just in denial about how complicated they were. Ignorance is bliss and all that.

Anyway, he couldn’t wear the Daredevil suit to the Laundromat. With this, he just needed to throw on a hoodie and he’d be set. _I wonder if Jessica will be there._ Matt adjusted the laundry bag on his back. It was making jumping a bit more difficult, but he considered it a fun challenge. _She’ll never let me hear the end of this if she is…_

Matt froze at the sound of footsteps below—fast moving, running, pursued by a second set. He only relaxed when one of the people laughed, calling back over his shoulder for their friend to keep up. They were probably a bit drunk (they were gone before he could get a good smell), but beyond that…everything was fine.

He kept walking.

The next sound that made him stop _was_ something. He heard scuffing footsteps, a solid grunt, smelled blood…Matt dropped the laundry bag and took off. He heard voices as he got closer…

“Are we gonna have a problem?”

… _familiar_ voices.

He slowed and stopped at the edge of the roof. He knew that voice, and that whiskey smell. “I asked you a question, asshole. Are we gonna have a problem?” Jessica Jones demanded.

Her heart was racing. So was the heart of the person she was standing near—she probably had him pinned to the wall. His voice shook when he replied: “You’re _crazy!_ ”

“Says the guy who jumped me in a dark alley. Listen, it’s not my fault you got caught. If you wanted to keep it on the down-low, you shouldn’t have been so fucking easy to find.”

There was one more heartbeat in the alley. Whoever it belonged to was starting to wake back up. Matt started making his way down the fire escape carefully. “So why don’t you just file for a fucking divorce like a normal person…” The second person stood, unheard by Jessica over her shouting. “...and _leave me the fuck_ …”

Matt jumped the last stretch. The impact rattled his joints, but he didn’t faceplant in front of the guy. That was a win. The others in the alley were startled, _especially_ the guy Matt had landed in front of. “Hi,” he said cheerfully.

The guy took a swing; Matt dodged it easily and grappled him. “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said, putting just enough pressure on the guy’s arm that it hurt. A warning: _Try to run and I can break this arm._ “Keep going.”

“… _Jesus Christ,_ ” Jessica muttered before turning her attention back to the man she’d been yelling at. “Just fuck off, okay? I don’t have time for this shit.”

She stepped back; the man, probably thinking that taking on Jessica Jones _and_ some masked lunatic at the same time was going to end badly for him, took off. “That goes for you, too,” Matt told the other man before letting him go. The man ran faster than the first guy. “God, what’s this neighborhood coming to?”

Jessica swore noisily. “ _I had that_ ,” she said. Matt heard her footsteps and the sound of items being lifted off the ground. “Are you following me?”

“What? No, I just couldn’t sleep. I was going to check on the streets and…” As he stepped forward, his foot encountered something soft. He stepped back and picked the item up. It felt like a sweater. Had she been going to the Laundromat too? “…do some laundry. I should, uh, I should go get that.”

The sweater was snatched out of his hands. “Did you leave it on the roof or something?”

“…actually…”

“Jesus Christ, Murdock.”

She didn’t say _thank you_ as Matt started back up the fire escape. He didn’t expect her to. Her heartbeat was still elevated. He couldn’t blame her. Being jumped in the middle of the night wasn’t any fun, even if you could handle yourself. It took him a few minutes to re-locate his laundry bag and walk back to the Laundromat. He almost forgot to stop on the roof, take off his mask, and put a hoodie on before climbing down.

Jessica was in the Laundromat, slamming clothes into the washing machine much harder than necessary. The repetitive _slap_ of cloth against cloth set Matt on edge almost instantly. “…they didn’t hurt you, did they?” Matt asked warily as he approached.

“You tell me,” Jessica shot back. She slammed the door of the washing machine shut. “You’re the one with fucking x-ray hearing.”

That wasn’t how it worked, and she was probably being sarcastic. But that didn’t stop Matt from taking a second to take in the situation. Nothing sounded broken—there was slight smell of blood, but it was just scrapes on the knuckles. About what you’d expect from punching someone without taking care of your hands. _Been there, done that_. “Listen, uhm…I don’t doubt that you had that, I just…”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I was just trying to…”

“I said, _we’re not talking about this.”_

Matt took the hint.

It hurt, because everything in him wanted to explain himself. The anxiety started blooming in his chest, whispering that she was pissed at him and if he couldn’t make her understand she’d be even more pissed, she might not even want to see him again if he didn’t make her understand…

_Shut up, shut up, shut up._

Matt took a deep breath and focused on sorting his laundry. _She’s just rattled,_ he told himself, trying to keep the anxiety at bay. _She’s rattled and she doesn’t want to talk about it. It’s fine. She’s not mad at you. She’s_ not.

He didn’t buy it, not completely, but it was enough to keep the anxiety from suffocating him. And, more importantly, it was enough to keep him from saying anything too stupid. _Let her talk first. Let her talk at her own pace. That’s what Julianne always does with you._

Jessica did finally talk, about halfway through the first wash cycle.

“…I thought you’d stopped slumming it in this place.”

Matt smiled. “I couldn’t sleep. Can’t figure out why, didn’t really want to dig into that too deep.” He tilted his head towards her. Her heart rate had slowed. There was still an edge to her voice, but that was progress. “I figured I might as well do something productive as long as I was awake. Actually, I was, uh…I was kind of hoping you’d be here.”

He wasn’t making that up. He just hadn’t realized how relieved he was she was there until that moment.

Jessica didn’t reply immediately. Matt got the feeling she was staring at him. It was an impression he couldn’t back up with any sensory detail—just a feeling. “You just talked to me, like, three days ago,” she said.

Once again, he was having a hard time reading that tone. Was she messing with him? Genuinely confused? Defensive? He didn’t know. “Yeah, but I like talking to you,” Matt replied. If he’d known what she was feeling in that moment, he might’ve tried to make a joke or respond with equal sarcasm. Since he _didn’t_ know, he decided honesty was the best policy. “I don’t get many chances to get out for long, so…”

Another long stretch without a reply. Just when Matt’s anxiety started acting up, he heard Jessica sigh. “You know, you’re _really_ wrecking the whole unapproachable angle I’m trying to have going,” she said.

_Ah, fuck_. That wasn’t the answer he’d been hoping for. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re not.” The washing machine creaked as she shifted her weight off it. “Doesn’t matter, fair is fair. I sort of smashed through your charming thing.”

That one he could read. It was dismissive, but…a very specific kind of dismissive. It wasn’t a tone that said she genuinely didn’t care; it was the kind of _keep it from getting too serious_ tone people used when they were trying not to make a big deal out of something. Breathing got a lot easier. “Yeah, you did,” Matt agreed. “I’m not mad about it.”

“You are too damn forgiving for your own good, Murdock.”

“Tell my therapist that. We spent weeks working on the fact that I can hold a serious grudge. Hey, whatever happened to that thing Trish was trying to drag you to?” That had been a few weeks ago. They just hadn’t brought it up since going to bother Turk. The dead body they’d found in the water tank had _kind_ of seemed more important. It seemed like a good change of topic.

“Oh. That. She ended up taking some guy she met at a support group.”

“What’s he like?”

“Rich. Kind of greasy looking.”

“Metaphorically or literally greasy?”

“Both.”

“Maybe he has a good personality?”

“Fuck if I know. I didn’t talk to him.” Her washing machine beeped; Jessica climbed down and opened it. “Apparently it wasn’t a bad joint. Good salmon.”

“But we’d never be able to afford it in a million years?” Matt laughed quietly. “So, you and me are going to have to slum it at diner around the corner if we get lunch?”

Another pause. That one Matt couldn’t figure out, nor could he figure out the skip in Jessica’s heartbeat that had preceded it. What had he done? What had he _said?_ Did she not want to hang out with him? Was he being too chummy? Jessica spoke before he could recover: “Asking me out to the diner and not that dive bar you were in? Classy, Murdock. No wonder you get all the ladies.”

She sounded like she was joking. Matt decided to play along. “Yeah, that’s my secret. Cheap, greasy spoon diners. Works every time.”

Playing along was the right decision—she seemed calmer after that. They chatted about other things until the laundry was done and went their separate ways. Matt thought about asking if she wanted him to walk her home, but the words died in his throat. She wouldn’t want his help. She could take care of herself. Right?

_Right._

She wouldn’t want him around too much, anyway. No sense in testing his limits too much.

 

_Three:_

Matt expected that they would start making enemies again sooner or later—well, that _he_ would make enemies. Foggy was the sensible one. Foggy didn’t make enemies. But the firm had managed to make a few the first time around. They had agreed, no more high-profile cases this time, or at least none involving conspiracies and cover-ups. Let some other lawyer handle that. Matt thought that would make things better, make things calmer.

He should’ve known better. Nothing in his life was calm.

He was just glad that Foggy wasn’t there when the guy showed up and started yelling at them.

“…sir…”

“Have the _nerve_ to imply that I would lie…!”

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“…who the _fuck_ do you think you are?!”

“Sir, Miss Hunter is entitled to a defense, same as anyone. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the legal system.” Okay, maybe that was _too_ sarcastic. _Dial it back, Murdock._ He could smell the alcohol on the guy’s breath. This could go bad, really fast. “I have other clients I need to see to, sir, and if you’re going to keep causing a scene-”

People could be really inconsiderate about Matt’s disability. That was a fact he’d learned to live with. They could be inconsiderate, uncaring, deliberately rude, or accidentally offensive. But these slights were, generally speaking, verbal, or caused more by carelessness than actual malice. And even the people who were rude knew there was a line to cross. You could curse a blind guy out behind his back for accidentally knocking things over, but you didn’t really confront him for it. And you did not, under any circumstances, punch a blind guy. You could punch a sighted guy in the same situation, sure, but _never_ a blind guy.

Unless you were this guy, in which case cutting off Matt’s threat to call the police with a punch to the face was completely acceptable.

Matt stumbled back, catching himself on his office chair. The shock of the fact that he’d been punched as _Matt Murdock,_ just for _talking_ , outweighed the pain. Blood trickled down the split in his lip. The guy’s sucker punch wasn’t bad, Matt had to admit.

But his was better.

Matt straightened up slowly, glaring daggers at the man as he did. “Okay,” he said quietly as he adjusted his tie. _Will I be able to hit this guy back and make it look believable for a blind guy? Probably._ “If that’s how it’s going to be…”

Before he had the chance to throw a punch or make a threat, Matt heard heavy footsteps enter his office. His attacker was suddenly yanked back and slammed against the wall, hard enough to rattle the doorframe. “Seriously?” said the person now pinning the man to the wall. “Beating up a blind guy? That’s pretty fucking pathetic, man.”

_Jessica._ _Jessica?_ What was she doing here?

“You okay?” Jessica added over her shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m good.” Matt wiped the blood off his lip. “He was just leaving.”

“Glad to hear it.” Several heartbeats out in the main lobby spiked as Jessica dragged the man out of Matt’s office. Matt could hear the man struggling, but Jessica didn’t slow down. It was kind of impressive. “Hey, pro-tip, maybe don’t punch a blind lawyer who can hold a grudge. Right, Matt?”

“Absolutely.” Matt followed after her, not bothering to keep a slightly smug smile off his face. “I’m counting one assault charge right now.”

“That sounds pretty bad.”

“It _is_ pretty bad.”

“So do us all a favor and fuck off, all right?” There was an _oomph_ as the man was tossed into the hallway. “And get your life in order. Jesus.”

The door closed. Matt heard the man’s footsteps as he scrambled to his feet and retreated down the hall. Matt could feel eyes on him, too. “It’s fine,” he told the couple who _had_ come here for a simple consultation, not to see Jessica Jones throw a guy out of the office ass over teakettle. “Everything’s under control. Thanks, Jess,” he added under his breath.

“No problem,” she replied. “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you’re busy.”

“Yeah, but if you wanted to talk…”

“I can wait.”

“Okay.”

And she did wait; she was sitting on what had been Karen’s desk when Matt came back out. It sounded like she was texting. “And just call if you have any more questions, okay?” Matt said to the couple as they left. “You have a good one.” Matt waited until they walked out the door before turning to Jessica. “Did you get a good look at the guy’s face?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Good. I know who he is, but I don’t want to risk him playing the blind card on me.” Matt gingerly touched his lip. It wasn’t swelling too bad. That was the good news. “You know what’s funny?”

“What’s funny?”

“This is still better than last time I was in this office and someone got pissed at me. Last time, it was the DA. And I completely lost my practice.”

“…Jesus Christ,” Jessica muttered.

“Yeah, he can’t help me. I’m past help.” Matt sat on the desk next to her. “So.”

“So.”

“You finally jumping ship from Jeri?”

“Wh-oh. No, I just figured I’d stop by.”

Matt’s heart started racing almost immediately. He tried to play it cool, but with them sitting right next to each other, he couldn’t help feeling like she could hear it. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, and it’s a good thing I did. You looked like you were about to blow your cover.”

Matt shook his head. “He was standing right in front of me and I got lucky.”

“ _Right_. How often does that excuse work?”

“More than you’d think, actually. I guess it’s easier to believe that I consistently get lucky than to believe that I have super-senses.”

“That’s fair.”

Jessica was still texting with one hand, still speaking casually. Matt wished he could get a better read on her, but his own emotions were running away with him. It made focusing on her difficult. He wanted to ask her if she meant it when she said she was really just stopping by, but he couldn’t make the question come out. “…thanks for the help, though,” he said. “Saved me a lot of trouble.”

“Yeah, well, what are friends for?”

His entire brain ground to a halt. _Did she just say “friends”?_ He didn’t realize he was smiling until Jessica reacted. “What?” she said, the confusion obvious in her voice.

“You said we’re friends.”

“… _yeah_ , what did you think we were?”

_Is there a good way to say “I thought I liked you more than you liked me”?_

Matt was spared having to figure that out by Foggy showing up. “Sorry, sorry, there was a holdup at the courthouse and…” Foggy cut himself off. “Oh, Jesus, Matt, what did you do?”

Any other day, the accusatory dread would’ve set Matt’s anxiety into panic mode. Today, with the giddiness of knowing that Jessica _did_ consider them friends running through his veins, Matt’s response was to laugh. “I didn’t _do_ anything!” he protested, still smiling. “That guy who sued Violet got pissed about my cross and punched me. Jessica saw.”

“He’s right,” Jessica said. “For once, he didn’t do shit. Except maybe back-talk him, but that guy was an asshole.”

Foggy’s sigh said he still wasn’t thrilled, but it could’ve been a worse reaction. “Next time, _you’re_ going to the courthouse,” he said. “Are you two…?”

Jessica got off the desk. “Nah, I was just stopping by. You two can do your…lawyer shit. I’ll see you later, Murdock.”

“Yeah, see you.”

Foggy didn’t say anything—not until Jessica had left the office and the sound of her footsteps had faded down the hall. “What are you smiling about?” he asked, somehow sounding more suspicious than he had when he noticed Matt’s split lip.

_She said we’re friends._

But it seemed like such an inconsequential thing to be smiling about, so Matt kept it to himself. “Nothing,” he said. Matt got down from the desk. “Let’s go over those documents, yeah?”

It was probably going to be a long night, but Matt didn’t give a shit.

_She said we’re friends._

It felt good.

 

_Four:_

He should’ve called ahead.

He should’ve called ahead and he knew it, but it had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. Anyway, Matt thought it would be okay. She’d stopped by unannounced at work and hadn’t minded him approaching her when she was following one of her clients. And he _had_ food. That usually made stopping by unannounced okay.

Usually. Not this time.

Matt could hear her on the other side of the door, but she wasn’t answering the door. He would’ve tried to open the door (not all the way, just enough to peek his head in and say it was him without having to yell), but it was jammed, again. “Uh…” _Shit. Hopefully her neighbors won’t mind_. It was the middle of the day, not exactly late at night when people _would_ give a damn, but some people were sensitive about noise. Matt raised his voice loud enough that she’d (hopefully) be able to hear him. “Hey, Jess? It’s Matt.”

That got her attention. The footsteps he’d heard pacing around a back room stopped, paused, then headed for the door. They didn’t quite approach it, stopping in what he _guessed_ was the narrow hallway that lead to a space that smelled like body wash, stale sheets, and makeup. “Yeah, now’s not a great time,” Jessica said.

Matt frowned. Her voice was a bit muffled by the door, but not enough that he couldn’t hear the hitch in her voice. Had she been crying? He thought he’d heard her talking, but had tried not to listen too hard in case it was a private phone conversation or something. Now, he was starting to wish he had. “Are you okay?” he asked, a bit more quietly.

Her footsteps approached the door. It scraped noisily as she opened it just enough to allow Matt to hear her clearly. “I’m _fine_.”

Then the door was shut again.

Jessica’s footsteps retreated back into her apartment. Matt stood outside her door, feeling more than a little dumbstruck.

_What the hell just happened?_

His first thought was that he’d done something wrong—fortunately, for once, it was easy to banish the thought. She was already upset. He’d just had the bad luck to walk in on it. _What should I do? What’s this about?_ It could’ve been anything. Matt didn’t know everything about Jessica’s life, but her demeanor had always struck him as…

He didn’t want to say _damaged_. But she’d been through some shit in her life, and that tended to affect the way people behaved. Matt couldn’t judge her for lashing out or not handling it well. He wasn’t exactly a model of mental health himself. He just wished he knew what had happened. He wished there was something he could _do_. She might not have realized it, but what she’d said to him in the Laundromat after his diagnosis had really helped. It made him feel less alone now. If he could do the same for her, he would.

He just couldn’t figure out _how_.

Maybe she just needed her space. He could text her, let her reply at her own pace…hopefully it wouldn’t make things worse. But, because Matt was a paranoid bastard who’d been through too much _not_ to double-check, he took the time to head up to the roof and do a perimeter check before he sent anything. He wasn’t sure why—maybe he was projecting his own paranoia about the Hand finding him again onto her, or maybe there was something more to the fact that she followed her clients around before taking their cases. Either way, it made _him_ feel a bit better to confirm that nothing in the immediate area suggested she was being watched or followed. Nothing he picked up on, anyway.

Matt texted her on his way back to the office: _Sorry I just showed up today. If something’s up and there’s anything I can do you can let me know. I’ll be there._ He wasn’t sure if he expected a reply. It could’ve gone either way.

He did get one, though not until several hours later.

_Im okay. Life is shit you know?_

That wasn’t the most encouraging response, but it _was_ a response. _Yeah I know what you mean,_ Matt texted back. _Do you want me to come over?_

_No its okay,_ came the reply. _Why did you have muffins?_

It took Matt a moment to remember what she was talking about. _Those were for you_ , he texted. _I’ve still got them if you want them._

_Im good but thanks._

_No problem. Muffins some other time?_

_Sure._

Matt wished he could be there in the room with her—hear her voice, listen to her heart, know that she was okay or at least on the track to being okay. He thought about stopping by to check (not going in, not seeing her, just stopping by). But she said she didn’t need him to stop by. Despite everything in him saying that he should, he didn’t want to disrespect her wishes. She’d called them friends. That was what friends did.

Still, he had a hard time getting her off his mind that night. It was a change of pace from worrying about himself, but worry was still worry.

He breathed a bit easier when he walked past her at a bus stop the next morning. “Muffins are at the office if you want them,” he said as he walked past.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jessica said, not missing a beat. “Don’t get beat up again, okay?”

“I’ll try not to.”

She sounded a lot more relaxed. That was something. Matt felt even better about things when she stopped by later that day for the muffins. Her voice was still relaxed. “Where the hell did you get muffins?” she asked as she accepted the box from Matt.

“I know a baker. Turns out the barter system is alive and well, or…at least some version of it.” He thought about asking if she was okay. He didn’t want to press his luck too much, but he _did_ want to be sure. Matt decided to keep talking. He could try and get a better read on her mood if he did. “I know it doesn’t pay the bills, but it does provide breakfast.”

“Has anyone told you you’re a massive bleeding heart?”

“Foggy. Pretty much every day.”

“Good.” Jessica fell silent. It felt like a very heavy silence. When she spoke again, her voice wasn’t as easy and relaxed as it had been before. “Hey, listen, about last night…”

Matt shook his head. “Jess, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I get it.” And he did get it. Again, he wasn’t exactly a model of mental health. He’d done worse things when he was in a funk, as anyone who knew him could attest. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

He heard a soft exhale. Jessica’s boots creaked as she shifted her weight. “…did you hear anything?” she asked quietly.

He couldn’t lie to her— _wouldn’t_ lie to her. Not about this. “Sort of. I know you were talking but I tried not to pay attention to what you were saying. I figured…you know, you wouldn’t want me overhearing.”

“Good.” Another creak. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I just…want you to know that.”

It felt good to hear that. He _had_ worried, in the back of his mind where the worry still grew like weeds in the sidewalk cracks. His concern for her had drowned it out, but it was still there. Lurking.

“Thank you,” Matt said quietly. “You, uhm…you okay?”

“…I’m better than I was,” Jessica said. “I don’t think people like us are ever really okay.”

Matt laughed quietly. “No, no, I guess not. But you know if you’re ever…less okay than usual…I’ll come over. No questions asked.”

Silence settled over the two of them. Matt could hear Foggy moving around in his office, the people in the financial office down the hall, the people on the floor above them having a meeting. He could hear someone listening to the radio as their car idled outside, the smell of the exhaust sneaking in through the window. He could smell the ghost of whatever whiskey Jessica had consumed last night was a bit stronger than usual, as was the smell of smoke in her hair.

“…I’ll remember that,” she said. Her voice sounded quieter than he’d expected, more tired. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

There were a lot of other things he wanted to suggest, all the things that had helped him in the early days after their team-up. But he’d gotten the impression during their chats that she wasn’t big into therapy. And if there was one thing Matt had learned about himself, it was that _he_ needed to be the one to seek help. He had the feeling Jessica was the same way.

She would come to him if she needed it. At least now she knew he’d be there if she did come.

 

_Five:_

Someone was outside the building.

Normally, Matt wouldn’t pay this any mind. There were always people outside the building. But there weren’t always people outside the building and standing on the roof on the opposite side of the road. He’d chalk it up to someone having a smoke, but it felt like they had been up there a while for a smoke break. Even then, Matt might have been willing to let it go, but the figure left not too long after one of their clients did. Specifically, the woman who was worried about ex-husband coming after her. The one who’d been looking for help with a restraining order and assorted money-related issues.

_Shit_.

“Hey, I’m gonna…” Matt couldn’t say exactly where he was going, not when there were people still in the room. Hopefully, he could leave enough hints that Foggy would understand. “I just remembered something I had to tell Ms. Porter. Give me five minutes.”

He heard a slight, suspicious inhale from Foggy, and a stammer in his heartbeat that could’ve been nerves. “Okay. Don’t be gone too long.” His voice implied _don’t die_ pretty well without him having to say it out loud.

“I won’t.”

Hopefully no one noticed that he headed towards the roof, not the ground exit.

He couldn’t find the person tailing his client—he hadn’t gotten a good enough read on them, between keeping his focus on work and the many, many sensations between him and whoever-it-was watching them. But he _could_ find Ms. Porter in a crowd. She wore a very distinctive perfume, and used sensitive skin detergent for her clothes. Luckily for Matt, she was also having a phone conversation as she walked down the street. Once Matt had a handle on where she was, he started scanning through the crowds for anyone who was acting suspicious.

He didn’t find anything suspicious. But he _did_ find a familiar presence. Whiskey, the smell of the city after dark condensed into a person-sized area, the creaking of leather and boots.

Jessica.

_Huh_.

Matt climbed down from the roof and moved as quickly as he could through the crowd to catch up. “Hey,” he said, trying to keep his voice low enough that Ms. Porter would notice but loud enough that Jessica would hear.

Jessica’s heart stuttered, then leveled out, probably when she realized it was him. “Before you start freaking out on me, I can explain,” she said.

“So you _are_ following one of _my_ clients?”

“Yeah, because she hired me to. I guess her ex is a real scumbag.”

_Oh_. That made sense. Extra security, though it worried Matt that Ms. Porter was _that_ worried about her ex-husband. “Yeah, that’s what we heard, too. I should get back to the office. I was just worried…”

“No, I hear you. See you around.”

“See you.”

It made him feel a little better to know that someone was looking after Ms. Porter—even if she’d had to hire someone to do it. But in the end, he couldn’t resist the urge to check in himself. Full suit and everything.

Jessica was perched on the same roof Matt had planned on using. If Matt was surprised, it was only because perching on rooftops after dark was _his_ thing, not hers. “Do you plan on sleeping?” Matt asked her.

“Do _you_?” Jessica shot back. She didn’t sound surprised that he was there. Quite the opposite, in fact. “She’s about to head to her brother’s, actually. I’m supposed to meet her in fifteen.”

“And you’re here early because…?” The pieces clicked into place fairly quickly. “You’re not just following her because she’s paying you.”

Jessica sighed heavily. She sounded so annoyed that Matt regretted bringing it up. Before he could brush it off, she spoke: “I had a bad experience with a client a few months back…before I met you. Someone was using them to get to me. I don’t want to get surprised like that again, so I make sure.”

_Oh_. Matt’s stomach dropped. He knew a thing or two about how _that_ felt. “The guy who was trying to get to you…”

“He’s not a problem anymore.”

Matt’s first instinct was to be relieved. Then he remembered a fact that he’d kind of put on the back burner about Jessica, something he’d been willing to ignore before because it was just innuendo and rumor. Nothing solid. But the possibility that it _could_ be true had reared its ugly head again, and now…

“Does it have anything to do with that guy you…?”

Another sigh from Jessica—this one through the nose, a short _huff_ of someone bracing themselves for a disagreement. “I’ll give you the honest answer if you promise not to get on your high horse with me.”

Oh. Oh, _shit_. “Okay,” Matt said quietly. His _need_ to know overrode his desire _not_ to know. “What happened?”

“...he could control minds. He’s responsible for the deaths of eight people that I know about. It wouldn’t shock me if there were more I _don’t_ know about. He hurt a lot of people and there was no way to keep him contained. Most people didn’t even want to believe he was real.” Jessica shifted slightly next to him. “You’re the lie detector. Am I bullshitting you?”

Her voice was flat, but a deliberate kind of flat. It was the monotone of someone trying to distance themselves from something that had happened. It was also a _truthful_ tone. “No,” Matt said. Everything about her said that she was telling him the truth. Jessica Jones was a class-A bullshitter, but she kept her lies and cons confined to the realm of possibility. If she was _really_ trying to deceive him, she’d say she hadn’t snapped a man’s neck, or come up with a more plausible explanation. Well…plausible for other people. Matt’s ex-girlfriend had come back from the dead in the past year. His idea of what was possible was different than other people’s. “You’re not.”

Jessica shifted again. Some emotion entered her voice when she spoke again. Frustration, maybe? Pain? “He would’ve hurt a lot more people if I hadn’t, and no one would be able to keep him contained. I know, you have your thing about…every human life being precious or whatever…”

“Jessica, I get it.”

“Do you?”

“I…”

Matt’s hands clenched a bit anxiously. He tried to gather his thoughts. Jessica stayed neutral while she waited for him to speak—not speaking, not getting more agitated or emotional. That helped him think. It was something Matt had been thinking about ever since Elektra came back into his life. He’d told her that they needed to fight the war against the Hand  separately, with their own methods, because he’d realized that she was willing to go to lengths he couldn’t. Lengths that were, in this case, maybe even justified, because it _was_ war. He’d struggled with that thought for a long time—it was part of the reason he’d _stopped_ being Daredevil in the months after she died. Because he couldn’t shake the thought that maybe he’d been wrong about everything. That the kill or don’t kill line wasn’t as black and white as he’d wanted it to be.

That one day he’d find himself in a situation where it _was_ a justifiable action—maybe even the only one—and he wouldn’t be able to make the call. Or that, if he let himself accept that it was a viable solution, he’d reach a point where he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. The way he almost had with Fisk. The way Frank did.

Maybe he just wasn’t cut out for it, regardless of whether or not it was justifiable.

“I wouldn’t be able to do it,” he said finally, because it was true. He wanted to be honest with her about this. “I understand…I get why you did it. If he’s as dangerous as you say…”

Maybe Jessica was fighting her own war.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“That you were in that situation. That you had to make that call.” He paused, still trying to gather his thoughts. “Maybe one day they’ll make prisons that can hold guys like him. So guys like us won’t have to make those calls. I’m surprised they haven’t already.”

“Yeah, well, people think that this kind of thing only happens to do the Avengers.” She hesitated. “I’m not gonna go Frank Castle on you. I just want you to know that.”

“I know.”

He believed her.

Matt tried to put the question of killing back in his mind. New questions flooded his mind, replacing that moral dilemma with the memories of all the moments she’d been jumpy around him. The comment about how the person had used other people to get to her. The fact that the usually unflappable Jessica Jones was still so rattled by whatever had happened to her that she was checking up on clients long after the guy was dead. A thousand possibilities occurred to him, each worse than the next.

He shoved those in the back of his mind, too, because he’d already pried enough.

“I should get going,” Matt said as he stood. “Hey, Jess?”

“Yeah?”

“My offer from the other day still stands. If you need anything…” He trailed off. “Just take care of yourself, okay? Be careful out there.”

Jessica didn’t stand. He could feel her eyes on him. There was something wary about that gaze. He had nothing to back that up, so he could’ve been misreading it for all he knew. But it felt wary. “You’re not allowed to say that to me,” she pointed out. “I’m not the one who gets thrown out of moving cars.”

Matt chuckled. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

But she had her own share of shit, and he wished that he knew she was taking care of herself in the middle of all of it. But Jessica knew what she was doing—more than he ever had.

Matt was sure she’d be fine.

 

_Six:_

At first, he thought it was morning and he’d slept through his alarm again. Matt scrambled for his phone, only hearing that it was ringing but not really hearing whose name it was calling. It was probably Foggy. It was usually Foggy.

It wasn’t Foggy.

“Hey.”

Matt frowned. “Jessica?” What was she doing calling him? What time was it? He fumbled for his clock. “What’s up?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound too groggy.

_3:57 a.m._ his clock chirped helpfully in the background.

This didn’t make any sense.

“Are you hurt? What’s wrong?”

“I’m not…” Jessica sighed. “Remember how you said…if I needed anything I could call?”

“Yeah?”

“…is it okay if I come over? I can’t be in my place right now.”

“Yeah, of course. Should I call Claire?”

“No, you don’t have to call Claire. I just can’t be in there right now.”

“Okay.”

He was still tired, still confused, but now awake enough to get out of bed and put a shirt on. His mind raced sluggishly, trying to figure out what might have happened. Could just be a bad night. He remembered what she’d been like when he’d showed up at her place with a sprained finger and a tipsy, beat up Foggy in tow. A bit frazzled. A bit like how he felt on some of the nights he couldn’t sleep.

She showed up about ten minutes later. She smelled like alcohol but not like blood, which Matt took as something of a good sign. “Hey…” Matt reached out for her shoulder, just to feel where she was, but didn’t get far; she flinched away, and he immediately withdrew his hand. “Sorry. Uhm…”

Matt stood aside to let her in. Jessica didn’t say anything as she stepped into the apartment. “Do you want something to drink?” Matt asked. “Water?”

“’m fine.” Matt couldn’t tell if the mumbling, quiet tone she’d taken on was because of the alcohol or how tired she must have been. It was probably both, now that he thought about it.

“If you want to sleep, you can have the bed,” Matt added. He followed her into the living room, but tried to keep a safe distance. She was clearly on-edge, and he didn’t want to make it worse. He’d probably already made it worse earlier with the near shoulder-touch. “I don’t mind.”

“I’m not tired.”

_Right_. “Okay.” Matt sat down on the couch anyway; standing was way too damn hard, but he didn’t want to just go back to bed. “Do you…want to talk about it?”

“No.” Her voice was harsh, immediate, like a whipcrack. After a pause, she repeated herself, quieter this time. “No. Just…”

Another pause. Matt heard her footsteps, then the sofa creaking as she sat down on the opposite end from him. He heard her taking off her boots and pulled her legs up onto the sofa. She didn’t say anything. Her heartbeat was elevated, he realized as the silence started settling back into the room. Something had her spooked and it wasn’t just his earlier faux pas. She sounded like a person who’d just run a damn marathon.

Matt remembered their conversation on the roof, the man who’d tried to get to her, the man who could make people do whatever he wanted. He thought about the nights he’d lay awake in bed, worrying about the sheer amount of people who knew who he was, where he lived. The Hand soldier who’d nearly killed him in his own apartment. Nobu. Stick. Even Elektra had been a threat who knew where he lived, for however brief a time. Even now, even knowing that she was better, that Stick and Nobu were gone, that the Hand had slunk off with their tails between their legs and had no _reason_ to come back to New York right now, Matt couldn’t always shake the feeling that one day, one of them was going to show back up in his apartment and finish the job.

Maybe that was what she was feeling. Maybe she couldn’t get it out of her head that, even with that ghost of her past buried six feet under, he wasn’t really _gone_. That maybe he’d come back.

_No one’s getting in here without me hearing,_ he thought about telling her. _I won’t let anything happen._ But she said she didn’t want to talk. She sounded so exhausted, so worn down that he was sure his words wouldn’t have any affect. She probably hadn’t come here for words anyway. She’d just wanted to get out of her apartment.

Matt knew what that felt like.

He didn’t say anything. He lay down, curling his knees up against his chest so he took up as little space on the couch as he could. He wished he could say something to reassure her. Anything to make her feel safer.

Maybe his presence would be enough.

He doubted it, but he was too tired to worry about it too much.

“…sorry if I fall asleep,” Matt muttered against the arm rest.

“’s okay,” Jessica replied.

Silence returned.

When Matt woke up, he had a kink in his neck and couldn’t remember why he was on the couch. It took him a solid thirty seconds to realize that someone had their foot pressed against his ass, and then another ten to figure out whose foot it was. Jessica. Fast asleep. She didn’t stir as he got up, carefully and slowly.

_Should I wake her?_

No, no, he didn’t want to do that. She had sounded like she needed sleep last night. Matt shuffled to the linen closet and came back with a blanket. Jessica still didn’t wake up as he draped the blanket over her. She must’ve really been out of it.

Matt didn’t want to just leave her there on the couch, but he _did_ have to go to work. He decided to split the difference, start getting ready, and wake her only if she wasn’t up by the time he was ready to go. Matt tried not to make too much noise as he showered, brushed his teeth, and got dressed. He was a bit too successful; Jessica was still completely out by the time his routine was over and he’d made and ate breakfast. _Guess I have to wake her up._ Matt grimaced. _This isn’t going to be fun, is it?_

Remembering how she’d flinched when he almost touched her last night, Matt instead crouched down next to her and spoke. “Hey. Jess?”

That woke her up. Jessica jolted upright, her heart suddenly racing again. “Hmph?” Her heart slowed somewhat as she looked around. “ _Fuck_ …”

“Good morning to you, too.” Matt smiled slightly. “I just wanted to let you know I was heading out. You can stay as long as you want…help yourself to whatever in the kitchen. Take the bed, if you want. You’ll sleep better.”

“…yeah, sure…” She didn’t sound like she was going to take the bed. In fact, she lay back down almost immediately. “Thanks.”

“No problem. I’ll see you later?”

“Hmmph.”

Matt didn’t expect her to stick around for too long. Technically, she didn’t; she was gone before Matt was done at work. But the next text he got from her didn’t come until three o’clock. _Headed out. I ate your Chinese leftovers. Thanks._

_No problem_ , Matt texted back. _Feeling better?_

_Not really but ill live_ , she replied.

_Glad to hear it. See you around,_ Matt replied.

When he came back to his apartment, the blanket was folded up on the couch—a bit sloppily, but she’d tried. She’d also tried to clean the dishes, though she hadn’t gone so far as to actually put them away. They were instead stacked next to the sink. He guessed she hadn’t wanted to go through all of his cabinets, trying to figure out where everything went. Matt appreciated the gesture, regardless.

He and Foggy went out for drinks later that night. Matt stopped by Jessica’s place on the way home. She wasn’t in, but Malcolm was. “You just missed her,” he explained through the door—not out of rudeness. He wasn’t able to get it open all the way. “I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

“That’s okay. Can you let her know I was here? I just wanted to make sure she was okay.”

“Sure.” There was a hint of _something_ in Malcolm’s voice, but Matt couldn’t quite figure out what. It wasn’t negative, not quite— _suspicious_ , but not accusatory. Wary, but a strange sort of wary. “I’d let you in to wait, but…” He pushed his shoulder against the door again. It didn’t budge past the one inch he’d been able to force it open. “Yeah.”

Matt laughed. “Are _you_ going to be able to get out?” he asked.

“She doesn’t care if I eat her food. I’ll be fine. Worst case scenario, I’ll use the window.”

“Just be careful on the last ladder. I still think it’s going to break.” Matt lifted his hand in a casual salute. “Have a good night.”

“You, too.”

Matt couldn’t stop thinking about Malcolm’s tone as he walked away. He felt like he’d heard it before, or something similar. It wasn’t until he answered a text from Foggy upon arriving home that it hit him. Foggy. Foggy used that same tone, but only under very specific circumstances. He used it whenever he asked Matt about someone he thought Matt was dating, or someone Matt had just started dating.

_Wait, what does Malcolm think is going on between us?_

Matt couldn’t get the question out of his mind. It even kept him up a bit after he went to bed. _What does he think is going on between us? And why would he think that?_ Did he only think it based on the fact that he and Jessica had been hanging out a lot lately? Or did he know something that Matt didn’t? He spent a lot of time with Jessica; had she said something to him? Or acted in a way that made him think that something was going on?

What did Malcolm know that Matt didn’t?

He drifted off to sleep eventually. He hoped that by the next morning, the sleep would have made things clearer. It didn’t.

He had all the same questions, and a new one to boot.

_If she did say something to Malcolm…how do I feel about that?_

_Seven:_

Jessica Jones was a prickly, hard-drinking woman who probably had more than her fair share of shit going on in her life. She was abrupt and sometimes rude, she smoked too much for his liking (which was to say, she smoked _period_ ), and Matt wasn’t completely convinced that she liked him.

But he liked her.

He liked that he could speak freely around her. No matter what he said, no matter how morbid or depressed it was, she didn’t make a big deal out of it. She already knew that he was a mess, so he didn’t have to fake it around her. There was no need to lie about _any_ of the shit going on in his life. It was liberating. He hadn’t felt this _free_ around someone since Elektra. But even those memories were tainted by the knowledge that he hadn’t really known her—not as much as he’d thought he had.

He _knew_ Jessica. Sure, she hadn’t told him everything about herself, about everything she’d been through, but he didn’t have to know all of that. She’d been honest enough—or he liked to think she was.

He thought about that a lot over the next few days.

Matt didn’t have many friends. He had Foggy again, tentatively; there was Luke and Danny, Danny more so than Luke, but they still felt more like acquaintances than friends. He appreciated them, definitely, and he’d trust them to help him if it really came down to it. But he still wasn’t sure what the parameters were with them. They were still uncharted territory. Not like with Jessica.

He’d been wanting to spend time with her a lot lately. Probably since he’d started running into her in the Laundromat, for _sure_ since he’d told her about his diagnosis. He’d brushed that off to the joy of having a new friend, someone who shared more parts of his life than Foggy did, but what if there was more to it than that? What if…

He didn’t want to finish the thought.

If there was one thing Matt was worse at than friendships, it was romantic entanglements. The second he started _liking_ people was the second things went wrong, one way or another. He couldn’t get it out of his head that if he tried to act on these feelings—if he was even feeling them, if this wasn’t just the mania or him falling back into bad habits with women or just him deluding himself—the entire thing would fall apart. He’d fuck it up.  And she’d never speak to him again. And he’d have lost a friend.

Matt spent the next few days thinking of every excuse he could as to why the two of them wouldn’t work. Most of them centered around him—around the fact that he was an idiot, that he hurt people, that he probably wasn’t her type anyway, that she deserved better than his mess. But that traitorous optimism he’d started nurturing kept chiming in: _You’re not as much of a mess. You made things better with Foggy. You’re already so honest with her and she knows about your issues. Hiding those was what broke up most of your old relationships. You wouldn’t be doing that here. You couldn’t if you wanted to._

He should’ve been happy that all those lessons on dealing with negative thoughts were sinking in. Instead, Matt was annoyed. He _wanted_ to be negative about this, damn it. He didn’t _want_ to be talked out of his catastrophic thinking.

Or maybe he did, and he was in denial about that, too.

Matt tried to keep his mind off things with work, with Daredevil, with trying to learn to cook more and doing anything _but_ dwelling on his interpersonal relationships. He didn’t see or hear from Jessica during that time, which helped. She was still on his mind, though it was because he was worried about her after everything, not because he was dwelling on the relationship.

Her texting him came dangerously close to breaking his resolve.

_So remember how you were worried about the washing machines catching fire,_ she texted.

Matt was, for a second, so caught up in suppressing his hope that he didn’t really register what she’d text him. When he had his phone read it to him again…

_Oh god did the laundromat burn down_ , he replied.

_No but half the place is unusable. People are still coming though. Guess theyre desperate_ , she replied in a trio of texts. _Just wanted to let you know that you called that shit. You should be proud._

_I’ll put it on my resume_ , Matt replied. He found himself wishing she’d been there to hear him deliver the joke—it was probably funnier that way. The thought was quickly followed by a sense of frustration that he was so concerned with how she felt about him being funny. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered as he put his phone on his desk.

He’d been able to phase down his therapy to once a month in recent times. Julianne had encouraged him to call if anything ever went wrong, but in a way, that made this situation _more_ difficult. He would actually have to explain why he wanted to talk, and every time he tried to script that conversation in his head, it sounded so fucking ridiculous. _Hey, doc, I know that you’re a busy woman with a lot of patients, but can we put aside half an hour for me to talk about my third grade crush on an alcoholic PI who snapped a man’s neck once?_

Yeah, he wasn’t telling her that. And he never did set up an appointment, no matter how many times he thought he should. This was something he had to deal with himself.

_What’s the worst thing that could happen?_ That was a question he’d been asking himself a lot lately. At this point, there was a whole ritual around it—find a quiet place to sit, breathe slowly, think about the thing that was bothering himself, and ask, _What’s the worst thing that could happen?_

_I’ll do something stupid and hurt her._

_What are the chances of that actually happening?_

He wanted to say they were high—his history with women, and with people in general, proved that if there was one thing he was good at, it was hurting others. But that optimistic voice in the back of his mind hadn’t been completely wrong. He _was_ getting better about these things. And he _would_ be going into the relationship with almost all his cards on the table. Not all of them—there were a few things they hadn’t talked about, like his dad, but nothing they couldn’t talk about later. Nothing that, if he didn’t immediately bring it up, it would ruin the relationship. Maybe.

Maybe.

He asked himself the question again.

_What’s the worst thing that could happen?_

_She’d say no._

_What are the chances of that happening?_

That he didn’t have a clear answer to. Matt still sometimes felt like the two of them were on uneven footing, that he liked her more than she liked him, that maybe she was just tolerating him. But he knew, objectively, that a lot of that was just the anxiety talking. She hung out with him. She’d told him the truth about what had happened with Kilgrave up on that roof (even if she hadn’t told him everything, the details she had shared indicated some level of trust, right?). She’d come to him when she hadn’t wanted to be alone— _him_ , when Malcolm was just down the hall and she had Trish on her side, too. His mind stuck on that detail more than anything.

_Why did she come to me?_

There was still a lot he wasn’t sure about—a lot he was afraid of. But the more he thought about it, the more appealing just _going for it_ felt. He liked being around her. He wanted an excuse to be around her more. He wanted it to be _normal_ for them to just…be together. If he just asked her…

_You want to get a drink?_

Past that, past drinks and dinner or lunch, past those early relationship days, he didn’t know. He just knew he wanted her in his life. A lot. More than what they had now, as friends.

“Shit,” he muttered to himself. Matt pinched the bridge of his nose, a strangled laugh escaping his lips. “Oh, Jesus, please don’t let this be mania.”

It could’ve been. It could’ve been mania making him reckless or his old desire not to be alone rearing its ugly head. But they could take it slow. Figure it out.

He wanted to figure it out.

There was just one problem: now he had to _ask_ her.

That was somehow more terrifying than facing the fact that he liked her.

 

_Eight:_

It took him a week and a half. And when he did finally ask her, it didn’t go anything like how he’d expected. He’d actually planned on stopping by her place and asking her directly, but Matt ran into her on his way there. There was determination in her steps, steps that sounded different than usual. It sounded like she was wearing heels—heels and a _skirt_ “Hot date?” Matt asked as he fell into step next to her.

“Nope,” Jessica said. “Got a job.”

“Need a hand?”

There was a pause, though it seemed less hesitant and more contemplative. “…you know what? Sure. You feel up to sweet-talking your way into somewhere?”

“I’d love to.”

He should’ve known. He really should’ve known that things wouldn’t be that simple. But Matt wasn’t thinking about that in the moment. He was too busy listening to Jessica as she explained the situation. It was another affair case, but this guy was a bit more ostentatious. He didn’t have his flings in the back of a car or in a cheap hotel. He was going all out, spending time in the same fancy hotel couple of Saturdays. That was as far as Jessica had been able to get before she hit a snag. He kept the curtains drawn when he did whatever it was he did, and Jessica’s employer wasn’t content with knowing that her husband’s periodic “business trips” were to the fancy parts of Manhattan, not the other office upstate. She wanted proof that he was cheating. The best way to get that proof was to get in the building, and there was no way some Hell’s Kitchen PI in a leather jacket was going to slip in without drawing attention. That was why the heels and the skirt. “Your tie is crooked,” she told him as they stopped at the corner and waited for a cab. “You’re going to make me look bad.”

“Oh, pardon me.” Matt adjusted his tie. “Can I ask a creepy question?”

“Yes, but only because I’m curious now.”

“Did you borrow perfume from Trish?”

“Oh, _god_ , that is creepy. How do you know what Trish’s perfume smells like?”

“I have a good nose and I’ve been in the same room as her? Trust me, I don’t necessarily want to know exactly what Trish’s perfume smells like. At least she has the decency not to pile it on. Some people don’t have restraint when it comes to that shit.”

“Am I on that list?”

“No, you’re okay.”

“Glad to know I can do one thing right.”

“You can do plenty right.” Shit, had that sounded too flirty? Was he coming on too strong? He hadn’t even asked her out yet. _Shit_. “What color is the skirt?”

“Black. White shirt. I haven’t worn heels in goddamn forever.” A car pulled up next to them; Jessica pulled the door open and climbed in, sliding over in the back seat to give Matt room. “I forgot.”

“How much they hurt?”

“No, how tall they make me. I’m taller than you now.”

He’d noticed.

“So, are we going to do the fake couple thing?” Matt asked as they drove to the hotel, trying not to focus on his growing nausea. “Or what?”

“We don’t have to play it up. Just laugh at everything I say and let me hold your arm or something.” Jessica paused, and this time it _did_ feel like hesitation. “Is that okay?”

“That’s fine.” He was more fine with it than she realized, though hopefully they’d get to that once this was over. “I’ll follow your lead.”

“Good.”

The car stopped, eventually, in front of the hotel. Jessica looped an arm around Matt’s the second they stepped outside. “Just act natural,” she whispered to him as they stepped inside.

Easier said than done. Matt felt out of place the second they stepped in the lobby. He didn’t have to see to know that this place cost more per night than his monthly rent. It was in the smells, the quiet classical music playing, the businesslike voices having conversations in the lobby, the various perfumes and expensive fabrics. If Jessica felt out-of-place, she didn’t let it show. “Claudia still wants to meet us for dinner,” she said, in a voice so unlike her own that Matt almost burst out laughing at the sound of it. “I know she’s been looking forward to this, but I don’t know…”

_Play along, play along_ … “Just tell her we’ve already made plans,” he replied, hoping that he wasn’t speaking too loud. “She doesn’t have to know.”

“I guess not.” Jessica led them to some chairs and sat down. “I’m just worried she’ll find out. You know what she gets like.” She added in a quiet whisper, “He should be here in like, ten minutes. I’ll let you know.” She leaned back again and pulled something out of her purse. “If we can just hold her off until tomorrow…”

They spent the next ten minutes planning out how best to fake avoid a fake friend of theirs. No one seemed to notice that they didn’t belong there; the staff was too busy with a large family having trouble with their room, and no one else had any incentive to give them a second glance. A few minutes later, Jessica stood, gently resting a hand on Matt’s shoulder as she did. “Well, come on. We can go once I’ve grabbed a sweater.”

They walked to the elevator, on the heels of a man whose cologne smelled familiar. Nothing else about him was familiar, so Matt assumed he’d just smelled it before. Probably at his L&Z internship. Matt tried to take in as many details about the man as possible. He was sweating up a storm and his heart rate was elevated. Anticipation? No, that didn’t feel right. Something was up. Matt leaned over to whisper to Jessica: “Are we sure this guy is having an affair?”

Jessica’s tone stayed pleasant, even as she spoke too softly for the man to hear. “Whatever it is you’re picking up, tell me later. Just smile and look pretty.”

_Smile and look pretty._ He could do that.

They followed the man onto the elevator. Matt kept his perception focused on the man, who was so lost in thought he didn’t seem to notice the two of them were there. He kept shuffling, shifting, fidgeting. Maybe he was having an affair, but his wife had tipped him off to knowing and he’d come to break it off. Or maybe something else was going on.

_Guess we’ll find out_.

They got off on the same floor as the man and took the same left turn that he did; however, Jessica sped up their steps as they walked, putting them ahead of him as she chatted on cheerfully about some museum they were going to visit. She didn’t stop until a door behind them shut. “Think you can sniff him out?” she asked, suddenly speaking like Jessica again.

“Absolutely,” Matt said, pulling away from her grip to turn around.

“Hey, hey, not so fast. We’ll circle back around.” She started walking forward; Matt followed. “You really need to work on _acting natural_.”

“I can’t be _that_ bad.”

“Oh, you can. Have you thought about improv lessons?”

“No. Should I?”

“You’d be amazed what good acting lessons will do for you. It’s the only good thing Dorothy did for me.”

“Dorothy?”

“Trish’s mom. Technically also my adopted mom, but she’s a bitch.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Jessica dropped the topic just as suddenly as she brought it up. “What were you picking up from the guy?”

Matt went back over the evidence in his head. “He’s agitated. Something’s got him spooked. I don’t even know if he wants to be here. You sure he’s the right guy?”

“It’s definitely him. Maybe he knows his wife knows.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

The hallways lead them in a circle back around to the elevators, then to the stretch of doorways where their target had slipped into one of the doors. Matt walked more slowly, then, head tilting to the side as he inhaled deeply, trying to find that smell…

_There._

Matt stopped in front of the door, switching from smelling to listening. He heard fabric rustling and creaking as Jessica pulled something out of her purse, then, past that…

“… _I swear, we’re going to close the deal…”_

Wait.

Matt risked taking a step closer to the door, frowning as he focused on the voices. He’d expected plural voices, but not three _male_ voices. “… _I haven’t let you down yet. You know I haven’t. This is just, just a bump in the road, I swear.”_

_“Is it?”_ The second voice sounded annoyed, bordering on full-blown anger. “ _Because this is a very long bump. Very disruptive._ ”

Jessica stepped closer; Matt held out a hand to stop her and shook his head. “What?” she whispered. “ _What?_ ”

“… _won’t let you down, I swear…_ ”

“Definitely not an affair,” Matt whispered back.

“Wh-“

Footsteps started moving towards the door. Matt heard one of them say something about getting some ice and immediately grabbed Jessica’s arm. He started walking away before she could protest; she must’ve realized what was happening, because she went along with it. Matt tried to walk briskly without running, but by the time the door opened, it still felt like they were too close. Too close, too suspicious, too…

“Excuse me?”

_Fuck_.

Jessica slowed down; Matt didn’t _want_ to, but trusted her to get them out of the situation. “Yes?” she asked, putting on what Matt assumed was her innocent voice.

“Are you lost or something?”

“No? We were just…”

The man strode forward, suddenly inches from them. “…leaving,” Jessica said, her voice just a bit too steely to be properly afraid. “Listen…”

Matt wasn’t quite sure what happened, but he could guess. The man got closer. Suddenly, Jessica _stopped_ , her heart picking up the pace. From the suddenness of the stop, she must’ve been grabbed or otherwise accosted. That was the worst thing the man could’ve done, because when Jessica pulled her arm away from Matt, it was to sock the guy right in the jaw. The _crack_ of knuckles against bone was loud enough that Matt was sure the others in the room had heard it; at the very least, they would start wondering why their buddy was taking so long to get ice.

_Shit, shit, **shit**._

They bolted for the stairs. Jessica briefly lagged behind, her footsteps changing from the sharp ticking of heels to the padding of bare feet when she sped back up again. “What were they talking about?” she asked as they found the stairs and started down them.

“Something about a deal? I don’t know. It sounded shady. Did you recognize the guy you decked?”

“Generic and muscular. _Fucking hell_ , why does this _keep happening to me?!_ ”

It would’ve been funny if Matt hadn’t heard angry voices at the top of the stairs. “Go, _go…!_ ”

They ran down the stairs. There were faster ways to get down, but that would’ve involved leaving Jessica behind. No way in hell was he doing that. Fortunately, they had enough of a head start that they made it to the bottom first. Jessica grabbed Matt’s arm again as they walked out of the stairs and back into the general public. “Easy,” she hissed.

They speed-walked out. If anyone noticed that Jessica was carrying her shoes, they didn’t ask. Matt could feel their new friend not too far behind, also speed-walking, not wanting to attract too much attention to himself but definitely intent on catching up. _Son of a bitch_. He had to bite back a laugh as they slipped out the doors of the hotel. _Why **does** this keep happening to us?_

They didn’t speed-walk for very long once they were out. A few yards, maybe, before Matt heard the man’s footsteps speed up. He took off running, Jessica following close behind. “Left!” she said. “ _Left!_ ”

He took a hard left. The sidewalk was a lot more crowded now, but when he reached out for her, there she was, grabbing his hand and leading him through the crowd. “Hey, listen, I’m _really_ sorry about this, but…”

It didn’t take Matt long to realize what she was apologizing for. There was a very distinctive air flow coming from below the ground not too far away. “ _Fuck_ ,” Matt said, the curse coming out in a somewhat frantic laugh. “Of _course_.”

The subway. Of course. It was a good plan, plenty of places to lose him in and all that. But that didn’t mean Matt was happy about it.

They darted down the stairs. “Do you have a card?” Matt asked.

“Seriously? _Seriously?_ ”

“You can’t just jump the turnstile, you’ll get _arrested_.”

“Oh my _god_ , Murdock.” She let go of his hand, presumably to check her wallet. “Yes, I have my fucking metro card. You?”

“Yup.” It was a damn miracle, too. He didn’t usually bother getting it filled, public transportation being the bane of his existence, but he’d had to take the train uptown a few times recently. “I don’t know if he saw us come down here…”

“Do you want to risk it?”

“Not really.”

They made their way through (and Matt could tell it _really_ annoyed her to have to wrestle with swiping her card and going through the legal way, but at least this way they wouldn’t have to risk criminal charges on top of the mob or whatever) and down to the train. The sounds and smells of the subway hit Matt like a brick to the face. He tried to keep it together. “When’s the train?”

“Soon, I hope.” Jessica’s hand bumped against his wrist; he took it immediately, loosely wrapping his fingers around her forearm. “ _God_. Fucking _shit_.” Matt started laughing weekly. She smacked her purse against him. “This isn’t funny, Murdock.”

“It’s kind of funny.”

“It’s _not_.”

“It’s a little funny.”

“I’m charging this woman extra.”

“You should.” His laugher died at a distant, familiar screeching sound. “Train’s coming.”

“Thank _God_.”

It was a relief, even if it set his teeth on edge and made his ears ring.

They got on the train. Matt had no idea which train it was or where they were going. They could’ve been on a train to Queens for all he knew, but he guessed it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting away. Matt listened for anyone suspicious as they sat down, but didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. He wasn’t exactly in his element at the moment, but Jessica seemed calmer with every second the subway travelled, so he figured they were safe. For now.

_That was fun._

As Matt started relaxing (as much as he could on the subway), he realized that he was still holding onto Jessica’s arm. More than that, she hadn’t made him let go. It was…comfortable. Easy. He remembered why he’d gone to see her in the first place, and wondered how it had somehow gone from that to the two of them, breathless on the subway, her carrying her shoes, him trying not to throw up from the motion of the train.

_Fuck it. It’s as good a time as any to ask her._

“Hey, Jessica?”

“Yeah?” She pulled away, but the sound of creaking leather and clinking buckles said it was only to put her shoes back on. “What?”

“Do you want to get a drink later?”

She didn’t answer right away. Maybe she was looking him in the eyes at that moment, reading the look on his face. Seeing that he didn’t mean that as friends. That this was him, holding out his hand again, but this time metaphorically. And this time they’d be running towards something instead of away from something. Running towards…

Well, he didn’t know. But in that moment, Matt wanted to find out more than anything.

“… _fuck_ ,” Jessica muttered. “Sure. Yeah. Let’s get a fucking drink.”

He heard something in her voice, something almost like a smile, and responded to it with a grin of his own. This wasn’t how he’d expected any of it to go—not just him asking her, but _them_ in general. Him and her. Jones and Murdock. Reluctant team mates to accidental friends and now…going out for a drink.

It wasn’t much, and if you’d told him a few months ago that this is where they’d end up, he would’ve said you were lying. But Matt was glad.

“Okay,” Matt said. “Yeah. Let’s get a fucking drink.”

He really was.


	3. Bonus Track: Playlist

     

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks are in order!
> 
> 1) Thanks to the mods of the Defenders Big Bang for getting this set up and giving me the kick in the pants I needed to write this thing.
> 
> 2) Thanks to mm8 for picking my fic and making the sweet graphics and fanmix for it.
> 
> 3) Thanks to my buddy Ana for not only beta reading the fic, and for co-captaining this boat with me and letting me bounce headcanons off her all the damn time.


End file.
